Divided Loyalties
Siberia
March 1990
Natasha stood in the antechamber.
She knew the stakes. She knew exactly what had brought them here. She was painfully aware that the twisted love she shared with her partner was the exact reason he was in this position.
“Widow,” said the man nearest her, a soldier or a general, hard-faced and unyielding. He had aged much; the once-blond hair was now silver, and wrinkles lined his face. He had several secrets for every shadowy crease in his skin. They were the only people in the small room, and she knew the glass was one-way, and bulletproof. “Romanova. I know you’ve grown accustomed to working with your partner, but the steel fist of the Soviet Union is no longer necessary, and he’s been compromised. You know how dangerous that is.”
She ignored him.
The man standing in the chamber below them was her partner and her lover and her world. For him, she had stayed in this life. For him, she had left for the West and spent four years in deep cover in London so they could prove to their masters that neither of them was compromised.
How wrong she’d been. It had all been a trick.
Natasha remembered the message she’d gotten in her intel drop, a casual mention of operations to retrieve “the Winter Soldier” from Iran. She had done some quiet digging on her own when her suspicions were raised; normally, details of other missions would never have made it into her communications. Sure enough, the Winter Soldier (a ghost and a legend) was nowhere near the radical Islamist factions of the warring Middle East.
When the Winter Soldier was told Natasha was in the hands of Hezbollah, he was not so careful. And they’d caught him, and now here he was, Natasha’s partner, about to go on ice.
She could try to kill all these men and women. She knew she’d even get through many if not most of them before they could take her down. But take her down they would. They’d made her, and they had the precautions in place to break her, too.
So she took the burning, roiling, blood-red fury and packed it back and back and back until no trace of it showed in her body, until it was nothing but a pressure at the bottom of her mind.
“Yes, sir,” she said. The perfect soldier.
“Excellent.”
Below them, her partner turned and looked up at the glass that he knew hid his love from his sight. He wanted to speak to her, to tell her in the words neither of them had ever uttered, preferring instead the gifts made each other of lives saved, wounds bandaged, hearts stilled, but he wouldn’t make this any worse than it already was.
So he didn’t fight the effect on his mind when the anonymous masked scientist began to speak.
“Longing.”
“Rusted.”
Natasha saw him flinch, one of the only times he had ever revealed his reactions like that to the people in this ancient bunker.
“Furnace.”
“Daybreak.”
With each word, she watched him draw farther away from the world, and from her.
“Seventeen.”
“Benign.”
He began to shake and shudder, eyes closed, fists clenching. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to grip his biceps - one metal, one flesh - hard enough to damage him and remind him who he was.
“Nine.”
“Homecoming.”
“One.”
“Freight car.”
With the final word, he stilled. His face emptied of any personality, and an imperceptible change in his posture transformed him into a different person.
“Soldier?”
The scientist sounded nervous.
“Ready to comply.”
Audible relief washed the crew of scientists in the bunker.
Natasha looked at Malyen. “Do you wish me to watch, or may I go receive my next assignment?”
Malyen smiled. “Do stay, dear Natasha.”
So it was a test, then. Well, she would not fail.
No trace of her agony nor of her fury showed in her body as her partner, the Winter Soldier, killed the three children held against the far wall of the chamber. Their deaths were not slow, and she knew it would horrify the tiny flame of humanity he had somehow managed to cling to all this time when (if) the neural programming ever faltered. Because it would horrify him, it horrified her as well, but she did not react.
And then, with both arms - silver and tan alike - painted from nails to elbows in blood, he walked out of the room and didn’t look back.
Malyen watched her the whole time.
At last, she turned to the man who had been her handler for as long as she could remember. She was technically the elder, but while she looked to be in her late twenties or possibly early thirties, every one of his eighty-six years showed on his body, despite the care he took. He’d be forced into retirement in a few years, she knew, his usefulness to their organization outlived.
“Are you satisfied?”
Malyen nodded at last. “Indeed I am, my spider. It seems that you managed to avoid being compromised with your partner. Well done.” He paused. “I know you are accustomed to working with him, Widow. You have been an effective pair.”
“You sever your best operatives with this move,” she said.
“He is compromised.”
“I would not wish to work with a compromised partner. I merely inquire if I will be assigned another, or return to solo work.”
Malyen paused. “You will be alone, for now. But there may be another partner at some point. Perhaps this Winter Soldier may even be returned to me.”
Her expression did not change. “I would prefer otherwise.”
“Congratulations, Widow,” Malyen said after another minute of silence.
She did not acknowledge the praise. Before her soldier, she wouldn’t have cared about it. Now, she did care: she hated this man, and hated that he approved of her actions.
But he would not know, not until it was too late.
“Come. Your next assignment will be to infiltrate…”