The meeting at the White House was overlong and contentious and Peggy returns to her office in foul temper and with ten minutes before she has to meet with her deputy directors. She can attend to the pile of paper her secretary has placed on her desk or she can attend to her growling stomach and she does the latter, scarfing down a packet of biscuits from her stash in the bottom left drawer of her desk. The crumbs are swept away and she's eyeballed the pile of "Director's Eyes Only" mail in the set of mailboxes along the wall before the first of her deputies arrive.
After the meeting, at which the current state of SHIELD is gone over and she re-emphasizes that just because the Cold War is officially over it doesn't mean that all of the rules no longer apply, she has a rather amusing phone conversation with the head of the CNTPA during which she explains, in her poor Italian and his somewhat better English, that (a) SHIELD requesting to examine a recently recovered item does not mean stealing it and (b) sometimes a weird trinket is just a weird trinket and nothing her agency needs to bother itself with. That she agrees to send someone to deal with (b) is entirely related to getting (a) and she makes a note to talk to Nick Fury about why she's overruling him -- he'll gripe about having his authority undermined, but if he ever wants to get his promotion to full Commander rank, he's going to have to learn to make nice. And if that means sending a research squad to Padua to look at a box so that they can get their hands on something they actually want to examine in Moderna, then so be it. Nick is brilliant at the covert aspect of their work, but his diplomacy is perversely stunted and she's half-convinced he does it intentionally because he is still pissed off that he got assigned to the Mediterranean Command last year and not somewhere where there's more shooting and less research. Which he knows she did precisely because he is already very good at the shooting and doesn't need the practice.
It's close to five when she finally gets to return to the Director's Eyes Only inbox. There's nothing there that's marked urgent, else it would have landed on her desk upon receipt, but there is still plenty of high-security business that gets done here that doesn't come accompanied by the blaring of klaxons. Everything in the box is in carefully sealed envelopes with tamper protection and most of it is paperwork, but there are four that are not. Two are DATs, presumably of interviews or interrogations. The other two are CDVs and those she opens first because they'll probably be shorter and hopefully more interesting. The first is a proof of concept demonstration from the High Energy Weapons division and, after the day she's had, watching things blow up in slow motion is rather soothing.
The second CDV is unmarked except for the date, six months earlier, scrawled on the top in black marker. Which is pretty much par for the course and she thinks nothing of it as she slides the disc into the tray. But what comes on the screen is nothing what she expected. It's a bird's eye view of a snowy rural road and she picks up the envelope to see who sent it as she hears the sounds of a car and a motorcycle before they come into view. There's nothing on the envelope besides her name in an unfamiliar handwriting and the usual codes to guarantee intra-office delivery.
She recognizes the car the moment it appears and, with sick horror, recognizes the place. She'd never seen it from on high, just marched around it at ground level looking for something, anything, that could have explained how Howard had lost control of the car. His blood alcohol level had been elevated, of course it had, but it was Howard and it would have taken far more than that to impair his faculties.
The far more turned out to be a motorcycle and an assassin and her heart soars with relief and the kind of righteous anger that came with knowing how to avenge the murder of her friends. But then comes Howard's final words and the assassin's turn toward the camera before shooting it out and she is frozen, breathless and numb. The CDV finished playing and the machine beeps at her, asking what she wants to do next and she honestly has no idea.
It takes her a long few moments before she can move, reaching out to tap the button to rewind the disc to the moment a man who looks for all the world like James Buchanan Barnes stares straight at her.
It makes no sense, of course. It makes no sense and any reasonable person would dismiss it out of hand as a coincidence or, considering the context, a bitter twist on a horrible crime. Bucky Barnes would be in his mid-seventies had he not died at twenty-seven and his good looks had been striking but not so unique that a casting call couldn't come close enough to trigger fifty-year-old memories that have blurred with time. Finding someone who looks somewhat like a man Howard had known to serve as his killer, making sure she would see it, too... vengeful and very personal, but not impossible. The world she works in is quiet, but bloody and dangerous just the same because a well-placed knife does more damage up close than a gun. And that's what this is, a shiv slipped neatly between her ribs and straight to her heart.
She doesn't know how long she's sitting there before Patricia knocks on her door to ask if it's okay if she leaves for the day. Peggy says it fine and sits there some more before she gets up and goes down to the archives. It's after six and while the research divisions are all still well-staffed, it's a skeleton crew down in Records and they're all a little terrified to see the Director show up at their door.
The SSR files are held elsewhere, but SHIELD keeps its own records on their missing and dead agents and she and Howard hadn't had much trouble back in '47 making sure that Barnes qualified. At the time, it had merely been a way to make sure his parents and family got a little extra money and a little extra recognition for the sacrifice of their son and brother. Now, it allows Peggy to retrieve everything they have on Barnes without putting anything in writing. She takes his file and the one on Howard's death upstairs without explaining herself.
The official SSR identification portrait is a much closer match to the face on the screen than Barnes's Army photo. It was taken not long after the rescue of the 107th, before the Commandos were officially stood up as a unit but after Steve had made it perfectly clear he was doing nothing without Barnes at his side. Barnes's Army portrait is jaunty and sly, a young man in the prime of his life about to go on a patriotic adventure. The SSR photograph is after his captivity and torture and while he'd gotten back most of the weight he'd lost, his eyes are dimmed and fathomless and his smile is for show.
The face on the television screen has eyes that are dimmed to darkness and no smile at all and she wishes to hell that there was something that set the two images apart more than personal grooming. There should have been something, anything to distinguish two men separated by half a century. Nose shape, jaw line, eyebrows, something that would have been left alone as 'close enough' to make the point without the unnecessary effort of exactitude. But there isn't.
She takes the files home with her because she can and because she knows she's not going to sleep until she figures out what to do next and so she might as well eat.
The search for Barnes's remains is technically still ongoing, the way the search for everyone missing from that war is still ongoing. The Department of Defense still gets calls from every place that had once been a battlefield with news that human remains have been found and they could be theirs and SHIELD, as successor to the SSR, sometimes gets the phone call after that. SHIELD sent teams to recce the likeliest areas in '48, the earliest she'd been comfortable enough in her job to divert resources from current events to close out a past one. There'd been nothing then and not at any point since. The report's summary conclusion is that either Captain Rogers misremembered the location or that Barnes's body was found by wildlife and nature took its course. Neither is a happy answer, but they are both likely ones. Except now she's got soulless eyes staring at her on a television and silently asking what if they are likely answers but not the correct one?
The next few weeks are busy and finding the time to work on her mystery in between crises and conferences is not easy. She has drastically cut down her workload in the last few years because she's getting old -- words she'll never speak aloud -- and because the privilege of rank is not having to deal with all of the stupidity when you have underlings who will fall on those grenades for you. But she's still working late more days than not because they are at the dawn of a new world order and some things cannot be delegated.
Nick shows up in her office at the appointed time looking defiant and concerned. He reacted predictably to the news about Italy and he suspects he's been dragged in from Rome to get chewed out. And so does everyone else, which is a perfect cover to assign him this most personal and delicate of missions.
"Find out who this man is and who he is working for," she tells him after she's shown him the video and handed over her work along with the files. Which don't have much more than confirmation that the assassin is no known descendant of George and Winifred Barnes and that there is no way to figure out who sent it or how it was delivered. "I want to know who is desecrating the memory of a good and honorable man with this impersonation. And why he was sent to murder Howard and Maria Stark."
Nick's eyes light up like it's Christmas. He'll gladly take the seemingly punitive removal from his post in the Med to do something he feels more worthy of his talents. She has to remind him to look chastened when he leaves.
She has given him six months, which is too long to dedicate someone like Nick to a murder investigation that rightfully belongs to another agency and not nearly enough to do right by the memory of Bucky Barnes if he gets nothing. But she's gotten used to having to carry these sorts of failures in her heart; after all, Steve's body has never been found.
At the end of the six months, Nick can tell her that it was probably the Russians who orchestrated the assassination. It was a tumultuous time back then, coups and counter-coups and all sorts of intrigues as the Soviet Union went through her death throes. Which side might've decided to murder the West's greatest innovator... depends on who was on which side of which fight at the time the decision was made. It's both irrelevant and of utmost importance and probably unknowable without making the investigation much bigger. And both she and Nick agree that doing that would only cause harm. Accusing the fragile and unstable successor of the Soviet Union of murdering Howard and Maria on American soil would destabilize the entire globe. It wouldn't be a plunge back into the Cold War -- it would be the opening salvo of World War Three.
As to why the assassin is a carbon copy of Bucky Barnes... Nick has no solid answers, just likely speculation. He is inclined to believe the assassin himself, whoever he might really be, comes out of the Red Room and Peggy thinks he's probably correct. Facial reconstruction to turn a Slav into someone who could pass as Western would be well within their repertoire and choosing Barnes as the model... Department X's fascination with Captain America is obsessive and all-consuming and has been for decades. Using Steve's face would be too on the nose, but using Barnes's... they'd enjoy the joke because they know it would be on her.
Nick is formally reinstated out of his purgatory and sent to South America because in between the narco-terrorists and the grandchildren of emigrated Nazis going through attics and finding artifacts, there's plenty of action for him. She doesn't warn him that he'll only be there a short while before he gets promoted out of fieldwork and into management. That would be unkind.
The other unkindness has been keeping the details of Howard's death from the one person who deserves to know. Tony is all of Howard's genius and all of his worst habits turned up to the highest volume, selfish and self-indulgent in a way Howard only rarely was and vengeful in a way that Maria had only ever been to her family's worst enemies. He's spoiled and brilliant and the tabloids love him for being so out of control and Peggy, who was there when he was born, changes the channel when he comes on the TV because watching him is like watching someone burn alive.
She's not expecting to reach him when she calls; she gets Obediah and that's probably just as well. The two of them have a good acquaintanceship after a few decades socializing at Stark family events and he has a better chance of actually getting Tony to listen. Especially because she's not calling about the most obvious reason to be reaching out.
"This isn't about him defunding the Arctic Research program," she tells Obediah. Because that was, of course, one of the very first things Tony is doing now that he's assumed the Chairmanship of the Stark Industries board -- he's stopping the hunt for Steve's remains. It had always been a dual-purpose project, Howard's love of science in no conflict with his respect for Steve, and Tony has decided that neither purpose suits his needs anymore. Stark Industries' weapons development doesn't benefit enough from permafrost mapping to justify the cost and Tony's ridiculous presumption that his father's love for a dead legend was greater than his love for his son had long ago curdled into poisonous envy. But the news she now bears is free of -- or despite -- the frustrated anger she still felt about that decision. She is being the better woman, however belatedly.
"I'm not sure it being about his dad is any better, Peggy," Obediah sighs heavily. "He's still raging through his grief like a bull in a china shop. Telling him that his mother was killed because someone was sent to murder his father's not going to make him feel better. And it certainly isn't going to make him hate Howard any less than he does right now."
Nonetheless, Obediah believes that this is something Tony should be told. They agree that Obediah will be the messenger and that if and when Tony decides he wants more details, he'll talk to her.
She never hears from him, which doesn't surprise her. It's not until decades later, after Obediah's betrayal is laid bare, that she finds out that it's because he didn't know, not because he didn't care.