Freezer Burn (46/?)
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
"I'm just saying, Big Bird's a little creepy."
Corrales gave Clint a sad shake of the head. "You need kids, man. Someone to remind you that there is such a thing as joy and innocence in this world."
Clint gestured at Steve. "That's what I've got him for."
Steve ignored the dig. "Who is Big Bird?"
The three of them were standing together in the heated command yurt, enjoying the warmth after the last couple of hours outside in the bracing cold wind of a Canadian prairie spring, which came complete with driving snow, rousting HYDRA out of the comforts of their northern Saskatchewan base. (After half a dozen missions to Central and South America and a week 'training' in Aruba, there had been absolutely no sympathy whatsoever from Ops & Logistics when the weather report came back with temperature numbers so far into the negative that it didn't even matter if it was in celcius or fahrenheit.) They were in the blissful pause between declaring the compound secure and figuring out what to do next, a task that would be complicated by the fact that this had been a joint mission of the sort where the host nation's forces were part of the solution and not part of the problem and thus had to be listened to and, at times, obeyed. Steve and Corrales, the two team leaders, had tried to be courteous and respectful guests, but while the Canadian Forces commander had been a generous host, the RCMP inspector would have clearly preferred that his be the only agency from any nation on the ground. Which was why most of the SHIELD troops were hanging out in either the command yurt or the (equally well-heated) chow hall with the Canadian soldiers while the RCMP swanned around outside in their balaclavas and puffy coats.
Corrales looked surprised. "You do all of those children's hospital visits and you haven't seen Sesame Street yet? What about the Muppets?"
Steve shook his head no. He'd seen countless murals and stuffed animals on his visits, of course, but he had no idea which ones were famous and which ones were simply the inspiration of the artist or mass-produced for toy stores.
Corrales gave Clint a dirty look. "This is on you, hermano."
Clint nodded, accepting the blame. "We'll do some corrective work once we get home."
Standish, the CF commander, walked up to them with a wry look on his face. He'd just been in conference with Desjardins, the preening RCMP CO. "His highness wants me to tell you that everything is being taken care of and you can begin to collect your men so that you can go home. He'll have Ottawa send on the reports when they're complete."
Steve, Clint, and Corrales gave him matching looks of frank disbelief. Standish shrugged. "I told him that you were Americans and used to going wherever you wanted to and the last time we'd told you folks to leave and you'd listened was 1812. Also, the PM is more scared of Nick Fury than he is of the commissioner of the SEC."
"So can we bum rush him and stick him headfirst in a snowdrift and get on with our jobs?" Corrales asked.
Standish beamed. "Works for me. We've got numbers and weapons on our side, although I'm pretty sure a couple of battle-hardened glares will be sufficient to make these guys take a knee."
They did not need to dump Desjardins in a snow drift, settling instead for giving their men permission to ignore the RCMP while seeing to their tasks. "Be polite," Standish told the assembled in the chow hall. "But be American polite, not the Canadian kind."
Steve let Corrales and Standish handle Desjardins, who reacted predictably to his authority being ignored. He overheard part of it as he helped move what looked like a cross between a howitzer and a telescope from the barn where it had been stored to where they were piling up weapons and technology to be airlifted out; it boiled down to increasingly loud reminders that Desjardins and his men were on their first HYDRA raid and everyone else, including the CF troops, were more experienced.
"Do you want to be immortalized as the asshole treating Captain America like a backwards child?" Standish shouted at Desjardins in French, the peculiar accent of Canadian French making it simultaneously much easier and much harder to understand for Steve, who'd gotten used to the dialects in France only after much exposure. "You think that's going to get you out of the prairies and into a place with more people than moose?"
The HYDRA base had been well-populated considering the harsh conditions and seemed to be a training facility. Not the basic training that they'd seen in Bolivia, but more for the array of heavy weapons found in the barns and in cold-weather battle tactics. It also might have been a logistics waypoint; there was no other explanation for crates full of mountaineering gear in a place, as one of the CF corporals joked, you could watch your dog run away for three days before he disappeared off the horizon. Securing the materiel was all well and good because it kept the items out of the hands of villains and it allowed SHIELD to see what HYDRA was using or intending to use, but after a few months of regular raids, SHIELD had learned that the less glamorous captured bounty was the more important. Invoices, old shipping crates with half-visible labels, crumpled up newspapers used for packing, these were as valuable, if not more, than plasma cannon parts or key rings. HYDRA had gotten no less scrupulous about their computer security than they'd been in Detroit, but most of what they needed could not be sent in an email or encrypted with thousand-character keys or passed on via disposable cell phones and that was how they would be tracked and mapped and, Steve knew, eventually stopped. The future was a magical and sometimes mystifying place, but some things never fell out of style.
As the sun set, a rapprochement had been grudgingly forged between Desjardins and everyone else; the RCMP had taken over prisoner processing and SHIELD and the CF poked around looking for evidence, which in turn they let the RCMP photographers document. Fingerprinting and photographing all HYDRA prisoners had been a standard procedure since the beginning, but it had grown in importance once police agencies around the world had realized that they could solve crimes by running their prints and sketches through the SHIELD database, to which Fury had granted access in exchange for the right to go after HYDRA regardless of international borders and without seeking local assistance or permission. Most HYDRA recruits were ideological or looking for a way out of privation and want, but a solid percentage were simply criminals who'd found in HYDRA a way to satisfy their antisocial urges and be rewarded for it. Out of the hundred-plus prisoners taken today, half a dozen or more would end up being extradited to their native countries to stand trial on outstanding charges and the identification of a few of the dead would close old cases somewhere else.
"Jesus, it's getting cold," Standish grumbled as he stomped his feet next to Steve; they were in one of the unheated storage barns waiting for some plastic crates to be moved aside so that the door they were blocking could be opened. Standish, like all good commanders, did not spare himself the hard work as a privilege of rank. After finishing up with Desjardins, he'd attached himself to the bucket brigade moving files and paper trash from the various yurts and small buildings to the heated chow hall where anything to do with paper was being stored. There were some tasks that would require staying outside in the floodlit courtyards as night fell and the temperature dropped dangerously, but anything that could be done indoors was being prepared to be moved there.
"Aren't all of you Canadians bred for this?" Steve asked mischievously. He'd given in to Mother Nature hours ago and was wearing SHIELD cold-weather gear over his uniform because the fancy fibers could stop a bullet, but they weren't much good against a deep freeze like this one.
"I'm from Victoria," Standish replied easily. "We start to cry piteously when it goes below freezing. Which is better than Toronto needing to call in the army when it snows, but what do you expect from Leafs fans?"
The crates were moved and the door prized open with crowbars and a quick blast of what felt like deliciously warm heat (but wasn't really all that warm in any other context) hit them before quickly dissipating. The inside of the door was lined with insulation and foil and the room beyond was, once a light was turned on, decorated in the same fashion as it was meant to protect computer servers in this inhospitable climate.
"Why is this here?" Casimir, one of Steve's team, asked rhetorically. "Why run a separate generator when you can keep it climate controlled in one of the heated buildings?"
One of the advantages of being so relatively close to home was that SHIELD had brought computer people, who were collected from the main building where they had been operating out of the various administrative offices, and set to work. Because Casimir's question would have had only one answer: for no reason they'd be happy to hear.
With the menial labor duties on hold in this barn until the computer people gave the okay, Steve bid Standish a temporary farewell and went off to find something else to do. And Clint, since he hadn't been spotted in the last hour or so. After a tour of the compound, checking up on his team and chatting with the Canadians and seeing how the preparedness for a night defense were progressing, he found both in the chow hall, where Clint and three other members of Steve's team were seated at one end of a long cafeteria table putting together what looked like a jigsaw puzzle until he got closer.
"They've got you on trash detail?" he asked, somewhat surprised. Sifting through paper trash and recycling bins was usually something the Direct Action teams went to great lengths to avoid, preferring to leave it to junior support personnel if there were any available or tossing everything in plastic bags to take back to the Helicarrier and hand to probationary agents if there weren't. But there were other groups at other tables also comprised of DAS agents - and CF troops - and Steve wondered if this wasn't a case of press ganging.
"Commander Corrales is a martinet who announced that if we wanted to stay in here and warm up, we had to work for it," Pahk answered with as much righteous indignation as he could muster, which wasn't an awful lot. "After a shift on perimeter guard, I couldn't feel anything below my thighs, so here I am."
Clint, who had his balaclava still on halfway so that the folded-up bottom served bisected his head at his nose, shrugged when he met Steve's glance. "I think he's still mad at me for the Big Bird thing and for not having shown you The Great Muppet Caper."
"Muppets?" Ramos perked up from where he was sorting through barcodes and partial barcodes. Postal and delivery service tracking numbers were worth their weight in gold, having led directly to several successful raids. "You're going to watch Muppet movies, sir? The Christmas Carol one is the best. You should see that one first."
"We are starting at the beginning," Clint said firmly, hand smacking down on the pile of paper slips in front of him in emphasis, a move somewhat undone by the fact that he and Kiplinger then had to reach out to grab the paper bits that had blown out of their stacks. "We will proceed in an orderly fashion through several key episodes of the original series, especially the one with Glenda Jackson, and then on to The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan. And then we will stop because the nineties were just not pretty for House of Henson."
Ramos made a noise of disagreement. "A Muppet Christmas Carol is a very good movie and deserves to be seen even when it's not Christmas. Muppet Treasure Island is not as good, but it has merit. Nobody needs to see Muppets from Space, though. That was a bridge too far."
"What is this malingering?" Corrales asked as he walked up to the group. He had clearly just come from outside, his cheeks red and his eyes watering. "You willingly indentured yourselves in exchange for feeling in all extremities and unlimited green tea. Work, or back out into the cold for you. This isn't a charity."
"We're discussing Muppet movies," Steve explained.
"Well, in that case," Corrales allowed, with a magnanimous gesture of his still-gloved hand. "Carry on. Them, not you, Cap. I need to borrow you for a second."
Steve followed Corrales into an unoccupied corner of the chow all, which they quickly realized was unoccupied because there was a draft, a jet stream of icy air at waist height. They frowned at each other and moved in the direction of the kitchen, which the CF troops had started manning, keeping the tea and coffee urns full and heating up what food they found and putting together trays for the HYDRA prisoners being fed in shifts under heavy guard.
"Got news during the last check-in at the 'Carrier," Corrales began. "Belgian elections are over: HYDRA's going to be part of the coalition government."
Steve took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, and nodded. This wouldn't be the first time HYDRA had won a place in a nation's government through legitimate means (or what passed for them in local context), but it was the first time it would happen in first-world country. Belgian politics were ridiculously complicated, as everyone who'd tried to follow HYDRA's advance through the process had learned, and HYDRA had taken advantage of the fierce tension between Walloon and Flemish communities to brilliant effect. They had been forecast to win a few seats, mostly in the Flemish districts, but the general belief had been that they would not be able to carry enough to do more than make a statement. But, apparently, they had.
He'd made two trips to Brussels, meeting with leaders from both the French and Dutch-speaking parties and attending a jointly sponsored rally against HYDRA that had been very well-attended but not, it seemed, very well received as far as its message. His presence had been meant to serve as a reminder of what HYDRA had once done to Belgium back when it had been occupied by the Nazis, but that had been so long ago that it was a living memory to almost no one and a history tale, glossed over and whitewashed, to many. Especially those with more modern concerns such as the still-recovering world economy and the just-authorized third bailout of Greece by the EU. HYDRA's candidates, preaching meritocracy and the myriad rewards of hard work and knowledge, had set itself up as the antidote to that.
"What's DC going to do?" Steve asked. Washington had announced early on that they would not maintain diplomatic ties with any nation that had HYDRA in its government. There was a lot of talk about whether or not this was an idle threat - the President not being known for the strength of his foreign policy - or if they'd follow through and, if they did, whether London and Tokyo would follow. London, tethered to the EU, would have the most trouble, which was why, in part, they had not made any official comment one way or the other. Japan, currently in an election cycle after their latest government had fallen, would depend on who won - HYDRA had no traction there as far as candidates went, for obvious reasons, but the parties were in disagreement over whether China or HYDRA presented a greater threat to the nation. "What's SHIELD going to do?"
Corrales shrugged. "I'm not the one who's got a permanent chair at Fury's conference table," he pointed out. "But if I were a betting man, I'd say that you have a trip to Barcelona in your near future. And if you do, then I have a shopping list - you can't find good fuet in the States."
Spain also had elections coming up and HYDRA was again playing divide-and-conquer, this time with Catalan independence and a version of anti-EU rhetoric that somehow managed to not contradict the righteous indignation they were fostering in countries that weren't in need of loans.
"I don't really have any history in Spain," Steve pointed out. "I was there three times, I think, and once was an accident."
The Spanish experience in his war had been a rather different one than most of the rest of Europe and he somewhat doubted that he'd be able to influence voters in any way. He'd go if asked, of course, but to what effect, he wasn't sure.
Corrales looked like he might have been about to ask Steve how one could accidentally visit Spain (answer: very bad navigation in foul weather before a jump), but never got the chance because a loud explosion outside shocked them all.
"Stay here," Corrales barked at the men inside the chow hall. "Secure your stations and then wait for orders."
Steve followed Corrales outside, where they could immediately see that the explosion had come from the barn with the computer servers in it. The building was completely engulfed in flames and troops and agents and RCMP personnel were already pulling the wounded to safety and looking for means to put out the fire. They ran toward the blaze.
"We're going to have to let it burn itself out," he shouted to Corrales over the noise as they drew up at the perimeter; the heat was welcome, but at the same time a problem that they would not be able to conquer. "It's isolated and there's nothing downwind and we're not close to water."
They'd taken out some of the generators and water tanks - unintentionally - during the initial assault. The water tank closest to the burning barn had been the first to go.
Corrales nodded. "Let's casevac into the DFAC; I'll set that up and you do triage here. See if someone can find Standish and Desjardins."
Steve nodded and started to pull off his snivel gear; it was fireproof up to a point, but his uniform was better protection for running into a burning building. His first step, however, was organizing the chaos of the rescue effort. Everyone was willing to risk their lives to save colleagues, but it was loud and hard to see between the pitch blackness of the night and the bright flames and there was confusion as the same areas were being searched by multiple parties while other areas went unchecked. Steve shouted orders, grabbed shoulders and pushed men in the direction he needed them to go, used hand-signals, and kept moving until there was, if not order, then at least some semblance of logical action. Corrales sent men from the chow hall with stretchers and Steve left Casimir in charge of making sure the wounded were carried off. When Clint appeared, Steve handed off triage detail to him so he could go into the burning barn himself because it had gotten too hot and the flames too high for the others. There were rumors that the building had been unoccupied at the moment of explosion, but it was not something that could go unverified.
"Cap," someone called to him. One of the CF troops, holding a fire extinguisher, which he tossed to Steve.
Once inside, he realized his time here was going to have to be very short - it was near impossible to breathe and the flames were eating away at what was left of the reinforced roof. He kept his eyes on the ground, going as quickly as he could without tripping to look for any human forms. He used the extinguisher to clear a path where he could and got close enough to where the server room had been that bits of foil and burning insulation were at his feet, but then he started coughing and knew he'd have to turn around. He found no survivors - the blast radius was large and that was not a surprise, but he hoped that was because the rumor of the building's vacancy was true and not for the other most likely reason.
Clint had a bottle of water waiting for him when he emerged; he used half of it to pour over his face and drank the rest. Then Clint handed him another one.
The fire burned itself out in a few hours, although they started going through the smoldering ruins before then. They'd sent the seriously wounded off to Prince Albert and Saskatoon by air, but most of the lightly wounded had chosen to stay behind and a few were already RTD. There had been several serious injuries, but no deaths and, once the adrenaline rush and pace of response and recovery had slowed a little, they could appreciate just how lucky they'd been.
The reason for their good fortune had been their efficiency. The barn had been emptied of equipment, at least what SHIELD was interested in examining, and the computer people had done whatever it was that they'd wanted to do to the servers and moved on to the next task, so there'd been nobody inside and only a small guard outside the barn doors at the other end of the building.
"Did we lose whatever was on those servers?" Standish asked. He'd been helping clear out the yurt being used as an armory when the bomb had gone off.
"Geek squad says no," Corrales answered as he sat down at the table that had become the de facto command center. Steve was next to Standish and so Corrales dropped down heavily next to Desjardins, who'd had the unenviable job of keeping the prisoners under control during the chaos. "They'd already copied everything and sent it on and had put some kind of wire tap on the things so that they'd be able to tell who, what, and where the requests for data were coming from. We'll probably be able to get who sent the detonation command from that."
"You'll forgive me if I say that I hope I'm not still in Saskatchewan when they do get that," Standish said.
The planes that were supposed to carry reinforcement in and the assault team and prisoners out had been delayed in Edmonton first by bad weather and then by the unstable situation on the ground, so Standish's wish was not granted. Steve and the others weren't airborne until after dawn, by which point they knew that the detonation command had come from Nevada, although that had turned out to be just a relay station and not an actual HYDRA base.
Steve got back to his apartment late that night, having spent most of the day flying back from Canada and then a 'quick' meeting about Belgium and Spain that somehow still took more than two hours. He'd picked up takeout Chinese on the way and took out a fork to eat it with because he didn't have the energy to fight with his chopsticks.
His phone started vibrating in his pants pocket, which startled him more than it probably should have. Especially because now that he remembered it was there, he also remembered that he hadn't turned it back on after finally escaping Fury's office. Only one person in his immediate circle considered being sent directly to voicemail to be an insufferable insult worth acting against, so Steve was utterly unsurprised to see Tony's name at the top of his text inbox. Which was pretty full because he had accidentally left his phone in his locker aboard the Helicarrier when changing for the mission and so there were two days of messages and missed calls to be looked through while he warmed up the wonton soup.
Most of which were from Tony, who'd been showing enough signs of life after the trip to Austin that Steve had started to hope a little, despite knowing better. He replied to the last one only, saying that he'd been on a mission and wasn't ignoring Tony intentionally. Tony replied immediately resenting the unintentional aspect even more.
A few texts were from Bruce, including one musing that he supposed he should be grateful for this glimpse of the old, hyperactive Tony. There was a picture of a bowl of tortellini from Miranda, to which he replied with a picture of the fork in the container of General Tso's chicken entirely because she'd be appalled. There was also a reminder that he had a dentist's appointment on Friday.
He ate his dinner while reading Sports Illustrated and ignoring the phone vibrating in the bowl he'd put it in (under a dish towel) because Tony was apparently feeling chatty and turning it off again would just encourage him.
Steve called Tony back after he'd put the leftovers in the fridge, at which point he found out that Tony not only could turn his phone on remotely, he could activate the video camera and had spent five minutes trying to figure out where the phone was before recognizing the dish towel.
"Once upon a time, you helped remove all of the remote surveillance in my apartment," Steve reminded him. The answering cackle was surprisingly good to hear.
"Is this an intervention?"
Steve sighed. "No, Tony." He slouched down and crossed his legs at the ankles underneath the conference table. The three of them -- him, Tony, and Pepper -- were in Fury's office, waiting for Hill and Fury and whoever else was supposed to be here, and until they showed up and the meeting began in earnest, he didn't have to exhibit any kind of proper posture. "I don't think that would serve much purpose at this point."
He knew the actual reason for the meeting, knew why Tony didn't know and Pepper did -- they were part and parcel -- and understood why Fury had wanted them both there. Although he didn't necessarily agree with the staging, he did agree with the purpose behind it and so here he was when otherwise he'd be back in Brooklyn, changed into running gear and trying to sweat out the emotionally charged morning he'd had.
Captain America had helped ring the Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange, the first day the repaired building had been used for trading since the Triple Bombing (temporary quarters had been used since the markets had reopened four days after the attacks). He'd stood among a party of survivors and the bereaved, holding the baby brother of Graciela Flores, the third-grader from the Bronx who'd been the youngest victim of the bombings and whose smiling school picture had become the iconic image of who had really been hurt when HYDRA had waged its war on "capitalism and its mercenary army."
The opening of the Stock Exchange at 9:30 had come after a moving ceremony out front on Broad Street that had revealed the memorial to the victims. Mindful of the still-incomplete work going on a few blocks away at the World Trade Center site, there had been pressure to have something done quickly. The memorial, a simple inscribed plinth supporting a cube of video screens that rotated through pictures of the victims submitted by their families and friends, was probably not what Steve would have gone with, but it seemed to be very well-received by the families and the newspapers hadn't savaged it too badly, so it would do. The Broad Street subway station would get its own memorial, but the station wasn't anywhere near ready yet. It would be sooner than the Cortlandt Street station destroyed on 9/11, however, so nobody had so much as complained.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Steve rolled his neck slowly, waiting for the pop, before looking over at Tony, who in turn looked like he wasn't sure if he should be preparing for a fight but suspected he should be. Pepper had been reading something on her tablet and looked up at Tony's words and then back down at what was on her screen. She'd witnessed these scenes often enough that she didn't need to watch.
"It means that you already know what everyone thinks and you don't care and everyone knows that you don't care," Steve said evenly. "Your pain is still more important to you than the pain you're causing others and until that changes, there's nothing worth intervening in."
Tony recoiled, but recovered quickly, glancing over at Pepper before returning his attention to Steve. "Wow. Been saving that one for a while?"
The words were supposed to have been waspish and snarky, but Tony couldn't hide the wounded undertone and seemed to realize it, so he stopped talking.
Steve closed his eyes and tilted his head back. He hadn't said anything that he hadn't already both discussed with Pepper and said to Tony, although this was undoubtedly the soberest Tony had been while hearing it. Maybe this time it would matter. As much as he hurt for Tony and understood that there were parts of what had been going on that Tony couldn't control, there were parts that he could but would not and that had frayed Steve's patience, another thread snapping every time he saw tears in Pepper's eyes or went on a mission where Iron Man could have been useful or could have saved a life.
The glimpses of the old Tony, infrequent but less rare than they'd been a month ago, probably made things worse. Tony's improvement since Austin -- still checked by backsliding -- sometimes seemed like it was for the wrong reasons. Tony had been inspired by Maya Hansen and Extremis because it tied in to his aspirations for Iron Man, not because he wanted to repair the damage and hurt he'd done to himself and to others over the last several months. He was replacing one false balm with another.
The door to the outer office whispered open and Fury, Hill, Tapper, and someone who was introduced as Yeowell from FININT came in. Steve suspected the last two had been waiting in the chairs Hsiang had positioned so that she could sit in judgment of those who'd approach the throne. He pushed up into a semblance of attentiveness. Hill gave him a quick look and her eyes flicked over to Tony, who was still sulking, and then back and he shook his head minutely; everything was fine. This was Tony being reflective, not Tony about to have a tantrum.
Once everyone was seated, Fury told Yeowell to begin, but to keep it brief and to only use words that everyone would understand.
Yeowell, a young, earringed man with heavily gelled hair, smiled. "Bottom line up top: after sifting through the evidence recovered during the last six months of HYDRA raid, we have added almost sixty names to the list of companies with ties to HYDRA. Last week, we added the biggest one yet: Trident Corporation."
Tony dropped his crossed arms and pushed back from table slightly, exchanging a look with Pepper that Steve could not decipher. He had known about the Trident connection almost since FININT had come up with it, but had sat on it until Fury had made up his mind on when or if Tony should be told. Steve watched him now, a tiny bit wary but mostly feeling like he was watching a friend open the best Christmas present ever. Tony's eyes were alight with something between glee and validation.
"Really, now," Tony said conversationally. "Please go on."
Yeowell smiled happily and, without waiting for Fury, started to explain: SHIELD's focus on the paper trails had finally paid off. Partial tracking numbers -- and the occasional complete one -- were harvested from the shipping labels and receipts and whatnot found at all of the sites raided throughout the world. Each one was searched against the shipping companies' databases -- Fury had gotten access to those through arm-twisting and unveiled threats -- and the resulting list of possible origin points and destinations, necessarily large because tracking numbers had so many permutations, was cross-referenced with its siblings.
"It's really easy to get a false positive off one or two or even five partials," Yeowell warned, pre-empting questions about why it had taken so long to find Trident's name on that list. "We didn't want to jump the gun. It's how you end up with newborn babies on the No Fly List. Google and Apple and Stark Industries, just to name a few, popped up all the time because they just ship so much stuff. We initially put Trident in the same category of likely exceptions, but eventually we were forced to give them a closer look after they popped up in a couple of other categories of accumulated physical evidence.
"On this closer look, we were able to show that over a hundred packages were being shipped to HYDRA or HYDRA-affiliated destinations on one of Trident's account numbers. There's plausible deniability here -- shipping accounts get misused all the time -- but the volume is high enough and the tonnage heavy enough that if Trident's accountants haven't noticed, they're either incompetent or complicit."
There was more to the story -- and Yeowell was willing to tell it until Fury told him to shut up and sit down -- but the main point was that Trident very likely was working with the enemy. Whether they were doing it for their own gain -- at Stark Industries' expense -- or out of genuine belief in HYDRA's cause, SHIELD did not know. And, not unimportantly at all, they also did not have the kind of hard evidence that could be used to make Trident pay in any court in any land.
"We're sharing this with you now, Stark, because it's very likely that you, through your company, are their target," Fury said. "And as such, we'll need your assistance to further the investigation. We will need this done quietly and without a whisper within Stark Industries' walls or into the ear of a useful reporter to goose the market."
Tony looked to protest, but Fury's expression made him reconsider. Everyone knew that Tony and Pepper had a stable of sympathetic media types that they'd use for all sorts of reasons, personal and corporate. Steve had benefitted from it himself, getting the bloggers who were convinced that Captain America lived in DUMBO to reconsider the logic of their assertions.
"You'll have whatever you need, Director," Pepper assured. "From both of us."
After more details were discussed, the meeting ended and Steve followed Tony and Pepper out of the office. They had flown to the Helicarrier by helicopter and Pepper had offered Steve a ride back to Stark Tower, which he'd accepted before they'd gone in to Fury's office and now was wondering how awkward it would be. He tried to take his cue off of Tony, but Tony was quiet, lost in thought. He looked over at Pepper, who gave him a tiny shrug.
"Why did you bring me in on this?" Tony asked as they rode the elevator up to the flight deck. "We both know that Pepper's going to be the one doing all of the snooping around the company files for Fury. Who would have been happy to deal just with Pepper. Who did not fake her surprise very well at all at these revelations, by the way."
Pepper looked completely unrepentant.
"Because you deserved to know, Tony," Steve said simply. "Evil people have been methodically destroying your life and if you wouldn't believe me or Pepper when we told you, maybe you'd believe it from people who don't like you nearly as much."
The elevator doors opened to a glorious sunset over New Jersey, orange and rose melting seamlessly into cerulean and lavender. And then the noise of the carrier deck hit them.
"I knew this was an intervention," Tony said smugly as he stepped outside. He turned back to Steve. "You staying for dinner? Marcel's doing a spring lamb."
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
"I'm just saying, Big Bird's a little creepy."
Corrales gave Clint a sad shake of the head. "You need kids, man. Someone to remind you that there is such a thing as joy and innocence in this world."
Clint gestured at Steve. "That's what I've got him for."
Steve ignored the dig. "Who is Big Bird?"
The three of them were standing together in the heated command yurt, enjoying the warmth after the last couple of hours outside in the bracing cold wind of a Canadian prairie spring, which came complete with driving snow, rousting HYDRA out of the comforts of their northern Saskatchewan base. (After half a dozen missions to Central and South America and a week 'training' in Aruba, there had been absolutely no sympathy whatsoever from Ops & Logistics when the weather report came back with temperature numbers so far into the negative that it didn't even matter if it was in celcius or fahrenheit.) They were in the blissful pause between declaring the compound secure and figuring out what to do next, a task that would be complicated by the fact that this had been a joint mission of the sort where the host nation's forces were part of the solution and not part of the problem and thus had to be listened to and, at times, obeyed. Steve and Corrales, the two team leaders, had tried to be courteous and respectful guests, but while the Canadian Forces commander had been a generous host, the RCMP inspector would have clearly preferred that his be the only agency from any nation on the ground. Which was why most of the SHIELD troops were hanging out in either the command yurt or the (equally well-heated) chow hall with the Canadian soldiers while the RCMP swanned around outside in their balaclavas and puffy coats.
Corrales looked surprised. "You do all of those children's hospital visits and you haven't seen Sesame Street yet? What about the Muppets?"
Steve shook his head no. He'd seen countless murals and stuffed animals on his visits, of course, but he had no idea which ones were famous and which ones were simply the inspiration of the artist or mass-produced for toy stores.
Corrales gave Clint a dirty look. "This is on you, hermano."
Clint nodded, accepting the blame. "We'll do some corrective work once we get home."
Standish, the CF commander, walked up to them with a wry look on his face. He'd just been in conference with Desjardins, the preening RCMP CO. "His highness wants me to tell you that everything is being taken care of and you can begin to collect your men so that you can go home. He'll have Ottawa send on the reports when they're complete."
Steve, Clint, and Corrales gave him matching looks of frank disbelief. Standish shrugged. "I told him that you were Americans and used to going wherever you wanted to and the last time we'd told you folks to leave and you'd listened was 1812. Also, the PM is more scared of Nick Fury than he is of the commissioner of the SEC."
"So can we bum rush him and stick him headfirst in a snowdrift and get on with our jobs?" Corrales asked.
Standish beamed. "Works for me. We've got numbers and weapons on our side, although I'm pretty sure a couple of battle-hardened glares will be sufficient to make these guys take a knee."
They did not need to dump Desjardins in a snow drift, settling instead for giving their men permission to ignore the RCMP while seeing to their tasks. "Be polite," Standish told the assembled in the chow hall. "But be American polite, not the Canadian kind."
Steve let Corrales and Standish handle Desjardins, who reacted predictably to his authority being ignored. He overheard part of it as he helped move what looked like a cross between a howitzer and a telescope from the barn where it had been stored to where they were piling up weapons and technology to be airlifted out; it boiled down to increasingly loud reminders that Desjardins and his men were on their first HYDRA raid and everyone else, including the CF troops, were more experienced.
"Do you want to be immortalized as the asshole treating Captain America like a backwards child?" Standish shouted at Desjardins in French, the peculiar accent of Canadian French making it simultaneously much easier and much harder to understand for Steve, who'd gotten used to the dialects in France only after much exposure. "You think that's going to get you out of the prairies and into a place with more people than moose?"
The HYDRA base had been well-populated considering the harsh conditions and seemed to be a training facility. Not the basic training that they'd seen in Bolivia, but more for the array of heavy weapons found in the barns and in cold-weather battle tactics. It also might have been a logistics waypoint; there was no other explanation for crates full of mountaineering gear in a place, as one of the CF corporals joked, you could watch your dog run away for three days before he disappeared off the horizon. Securing the materiel was all well and good because it kept the items out of the hands of villains and it allowed SHIELD to see what HYDRA was using or intending to use, but after a few months of regular raids, SHIELD had learned that the less glamorous captured bounty was the more important. Invoices, old shipping crates with half-visible labels, crumpled up newspapers used for packing, these were as valuable, if not more, than plasma cannon parts or key rings. HYDRA had gotten no less scrupulous about their computer security than they'd been in Detroit, but most of what they needed could not be sent in an email or encrypted with thousand-character keys or passed on via disposable cell phones and that was how they would be tracked and mapped and, Steve knew, eventually stopped. The future was a magical and sometimes mystifying place, but some things never fell out of style.
As the sun set, a rapprochement had been grudgingly forged between Desjardins and everyone else; the RCMP had taken over prisoner processing and SHIELD and the CF poked around looking for evidence, which in turn they let the RCMP photographers document. Fingerprinting and photographing all HYDRA prisoners had been a standard procedure since the beginning, but it had grown in importance once police agencies around the world had realized that they could solve crimes by running their prints and sketches through the SHIELD database, to which Fury had granted access in exchange for the right to go after HYDRA regardless of international borders and without seeking local assistance or permission. Most HYDRA recruits were ideological or looking for a way out of privation and want, but a solid percentage were simply criminals who'd found in HYDRA a way to satisfy their antisocial urges and be rewarded for it. Out of the hundred-plus prisoners taken today, half a dozen or more would end up being extradited to their native countries to stand trial on outstanding charges and the identification of a few of the dead would close old cases somewhere else.
"Jesus, it's getting cold," Standish grumbled as he stomped his feet next to Steve; they were in one of the unheated storage barns waiting for some plastic crates to be moved aside so that the door they were blocking could be opened. Standish, like all good commanders, did not spare himself the hard work as a privilege of rank. After finishing up with Desjardins, he'd attached himself to the bucket brigade moving files and paper trash from the various yurts and small buildings to the heated chow hall where anything to do with paper was being stored. There were some tasks that would require staying outside in the floodlit courtyards as night fell and the temperature dropped dangerously, but anything that could be done indoors was being prepared to be moved there.
"Aren't all of you Canadians bred for this?" Steve asked mischievously. He'd given in to Mother Nature hours ago and was wearing SHIELD cold-weather gear over his uniform because the fancy fibers could stop a bullet, but they weren't much good against a deep freeze like this one.
"I'm from Victoria," Standish replied easily. "We start to cry piteously when it goes below freezing. Which is better than Toronto needing to call in the army when it snows, but what do you expect from Leafs fans?"
The crates were moved and the door prized open with crowbars and a quick blast of what felt like deliciously warm heat (but wasn't really all that warm in any other context) hit them before quickly dissipating. The inside of the door was lined with insulation and foil and the room beyond was, once a light was turned on, decorated in the same fashion as it was meant to protect computer servers in this inhospitable climate.
"Why is this here?" Casimir, one of Steve's team, asked rhetorically. "Why run a separate generator when you can keep it climate controlled in one of the heated buildings?"
One of the advantages of being so relatively close to home was that SHIELD had brought computer people, who were collected from the main building where they had been operating out of the various administrative offices, and set to work. Because Casimir's question would have had only one answer: for no reason they'd be happy to hear.
With the menial labor duties on hold in this barn until the computer people gave the okay, Steve bid Standish a temporary farewell and went off to find something else to do. And Clint, since he hadn't been spotted in the last hour or so. After a tour of the compound, checking up on his team and chatting with the Canadians and seeing how the preparedness for a night defense were progressing, he found both in the chow hall, where Clint and three other members of Steve's team were seated at one end of a long cafeteria table putting together what looked like a jigsaw puzzle until he got closer.
"They've got you on trash detail?" he asked, somewhat surprised. Sifting through paper trash and recycling bins was usually something the Direct Action teams went to great lengths to avoid, preferring to leave it to junior support personnel if there were any available or tossing everything in plastic bags to take back to the Helicarrier and hand to probationary agents if there weren't. But there were other groups at other tables also comprised of DAS agents - and CF troops - and Steve wondered if this wasn't a case of press ganging.
"Commander Corrales is a martinet who announced that if we wanted to stay in here and warm up, we had to work for it," Pahk answered with as much righteous indignation as he could muster, which wasn't an awful lot. "After a shift on perimeter guard, I couldn't feel anything below my thighs, so here I am."
Clint, who had his balaclava still on halfway so that the folded-up bottom served bisected his head at his nose, shrugged when he met Steve's glance. "I think he's still mad at me for the Big Bird thing and for not having shown you The Great Muppet Caper."
"Muppets?" Ramos perked up from where he was sorting through barcodes and partial barcodes. Postal and delivery service tracking numbers were worth their weight in gold, having led directly to several successful raids. "You're going to watch Muppet movies, sir? The Christmas Carol one is the best. You should see that one first."
"We are starting at the beginning," Clint said firmly, hand smacking down on the pile of paper slips in front of him in emphasis, a move somewhat undone by the fact that he and Kiplinger then had to reach out to grab the paper bits that had blown out of their stacks. "We will proceed in an orderly fashion through several key episodes of the original series, especially the one with Glenda Jackson, and then on to The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan. And then we will stop because the nineties were just not pretty for House of Henson."
Ramos made a noise of disagreement. "A Muppet Christmas Carol is a very good movie and deserves to be seen even when it's not Christmas. Muppet Treasure Island is not as good, but it has merit. Nobody needs to see Muppets from Space, though. That was a bridge too far."
"What is this malingering?" Corrales asked as he walked up to the group. He had clearly just come from outside, his cheeks red and his eyes watering. "You willingly indentured yourselves in exchange for feeling in all extremities and unlimited green tea. Work, or back out into the cold for you. This isn't a charity."
"We're discussing Muppet movies," Steve explained.
"Well, in that case," Corrales allowed, with a magnanimous gesture of his still-gloved hand. "Carry on. Them, not you, Cap. I need to borrow you for a second."
Steve followed Corrales into an unoccupied corner of the chow all, which they quickly realized was unoccupied because there was a draft, a jet stream of icy air at waist height. They frowned at each other and moved in the direction of the kitchen, which the CF troops had started manning, keeping the tea and coffee urns full and heating up what food they found and putting together trays for the HYDRA prisoners being fed in shifts under heavy guard.
"Got news during the last check-in at the 'Carrier," Corrales began. "Belgian elections are over: HYDRA's going to be part of the coalition government."
Steve took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, and nodded. This wouldn't be the first time HYDRA had won a place in a nation's government through legitimate means (or what passed for them in local context), but it was the first time it would happen in first-world country. Belgian politics were ridiculously complicated, as everyone who'd tried to follow HYDRA's advance through the process had learned, and HYDRA had taken advantage of the fierce tension between Walloon and Flemish communities to brilliant effect. They had been forecast to win a few seats, mostly in the Flemish districts, but the general belief had been that they would not be able to carry enough to do more than make a statement. But, apparently, they had.
He'd made two trips to Brussels, meeting with leaders from both the French and Dutch-speaking parties and attending a jointly sponsored rally against HYDRA that had been very well-attended but not, it seemed, very well received as far as its message. His presence had been meant to serve as a reminder of what HYDRA had once done to Belgium back when it had been occupied by the Nazis, but that had been so long ago that it was a living memory to almost no one and a history tale, glossed over and whitewashed, to many. Especially those with more modern concerns such as the still-recovering world economy and the just-authorized third bailout of Greece by the EU. HYDRA's candidates, preaching meritocracy and the myriad rewards of hard work and knowledge, had set itself up as the antidote to that.
"What's DC going to do?" Steve asked. Washington had announced early on that they would not maintain diplomatic ties with any nation that had HYDRA in its government. There was a lot of talk about whether or not this was an idle threat - the President not being known for the strength of his foreign policy - or if they'd follow through and, if they did, whether London and Tokyo would follow. London, tethered to the EU, would have the most trouble, which was why, in part, they had not made any official comment one way or the other. Japan, currently in an election cycle after their latest government had fallen, would depend on who won - HYDRA had no traction there as far as candidates went, for obvious reasons, but the parties were in disagreement over whether China or HYDRA presented a greater threat to the nation. "What's SHIELD going to do?"
Corrales shrugged. "I'm not the one who's got a permanent chair at Fury's conference table," he pointed out. "But if I were a betting man, I'd say that you have a trip to Barcelona in your near future. And if you do, then I have a shopping list - you can't find good fuet in the States."
Spain also had elections coming up and HYDRA was again playing divide-and-conquer, this time with Catalan independence and a version of anti-EU rhetoric that somehow managed to not contradict the righteous indignation they were fostering in countries that weren't in need of loans.
"I don't really have any history in Spain," Steve pointed out. "I was there three times, I think, and once was an accident."
The Spanish experience in his war had been a rather different one than most of the rest of Europe and he somewhat doubted that he'd be able to influence voters in any way. He'd go if asked, of course, but to what effect, he wasn't sure.
Corrales looked like he might have been about to ask Steve how one could accidentally visit Spain (answer: very bad navigation in foul weather before a jump), but never got the chance because a loud explosion outside shocked them all.
"Stay here," Corrales barked at the men inside the chow hall. "Secure your stations and then wait for orders."
Steve followed Corrales outside, where they could immediately see that the explosion had come from the barn with the computer servers in it. The building was completely engulfed in flames and troops and agents and RCMP personnel were already pulling the wounded to safety and looking for means to put out the fire. They ran toward the blaze.
"We're going to have to let it burn itself out," he shouted to Corrales over the noise as they drew up at the perimeter; the heat was welcome, but at the same time a problem that they would not be able to conquer. "It's isolated and there's nothing downwind and we're not close to water."
They'd taken out some of the generators and water tanks - unintentionally - during the initial assault. The water tank closest to the burning barn had been the first to go.
Corrales nodded. "Let's casevac into the DFAC; I'll set that up and you do triage here. See if someone can find Standish and Desjardins."
Steve nodded and started to pull off his snivel gear; it was fireproof up to a point, but his uniform was better protection for running into a burning building. His first step, however, was organizing the chaos of the rescue effort. Everyone was willing to risk their lives to save colleagues, but it was loud and hard to see between the pitch blackness of the night and the bright flames and there was confusion as the same areas were being searched by multiple parties while other areas went unchecked. Steve shouted orders, grabbed shoulders and pushed men in the direction he needed them to go, used hand-signals, and kept moving until there was, if not order, then at least some semblance of logical action. Corrales sent men from the chow hall with stretchers and Steve left Casimir in charge of making sure the wounded were carried off. When Clint appeared, Steve handed off triage detail to him so he could go into the burning barn himself because it had gotten too hot and the flames too high for the others. There were rumors that the building had been unoccupied at the moment of explosion, but it was not something that could go unverified.
"Cap," someone called to him. One of the CF troops, holding a fire extinguisher, which he tossed to Steve.
Once inside, he realized his time here was going to have to be very short - it was near impossible to breathe and the flames were eating away at what was left of the reinforced roof. He kept his eyes on the ground, going as quickly as he could without tripping to look for any human forms. He used the extinguisher to clear a path where he could and got close enough to where the server room had been that bits of foil and burning insulation were at his feet, but then he started coughing and knew he'd have to turn around. He found no survivors - the blast radius was large and that was not a surprise, but he hoped that was because the rumor of the building's vacancy was true and not for the other most likely reason.
Clint had a bottle of water waiting for him when he emerged; he used half of it to pour over his face and drank the rest. Then Clint handed him another one.
The fire burned itself out in a few hours, although they started going through the smoldering ruins before then. They'd sent the seriously wounded off to Prince Albert and Saskatoon by air, but most of the lightly wounded had chosen to stay behind and a few were already RTD. There had been several serious injuries, but no deaths and, once the adrenaline rush and pace of response and recovery had slowed a little, they could appreciate just how lucky they'd been.
The reason for their good fortune had been their efficiency. The barn had been emptied of equipment, at least what SHIELD was interested in examining, and the computer people had done whatever it was that they'd wanted to do to the servers and moved on to the next task, so there'd been nobody inside and only a small guard outside the barn doors at the other end of the building.
"Did we lose whatever was on those servers?" Standish asked. He'd been helping clear out the yurt being used as an armory when the bomb had gone off.
"Geek squad says no," Corrales answered as he sat down at the table that had become the de facto command center. Steve was next to Standish and so Corrales dropped down heavily next to Desjardins, who'd had the unenviable job of keeping the prisoners under control during the chaos. "They'd already copied everything and sent it on and had put some kind of wire tap on the things so that they'd be able to tell who, what, and where the requests for data were coming from. We'll probably be able to get who sent the detonation command from that."
"You'll forgive me if I say that I hope I'm not still in Saskatchewan when they do get that," Standish said.
The planes that were supposed to carry reinforcement in and the assault team and prisoners out had been delayed in Edmonton first by bad weather and then by the unstable situation on the ground, so Standish's wish was not granted. Steve and the others weren't airborne until after dawn, by which point they knew that the detonation command had come from Nevada, although that had turned out to be just a relay station and not an actual HYDRA base.
Steve got back to his apartment late that night, having spent most of the day flying back from Canada and then a 'quick' meeting about Belgium and Spain that somehow still took more than two hours. He'd picked up takeout Chinese on the way and took out a fork to eat it with because he didn't have the energy to fight with his chopsticks.
His phone started vibrating in his pants pocket, which startled him more than it probably should have. Especially because now that he remembered it was there, he also remembered that he hadn't turned it back on after finally escaping Fury's office. Only one person in his immediate circle considered being sent directly to voicemail to be an insufferable insult worth acting against, so Steve was utterly unsurprised to see Tony's name at the top of his text inbox. Which was pretty full because he had accidentally left his phone in his locker aboard the Helicarrier when changing for the mission and so there were two days of messages and missed calls to be looked through while he warmed up the wonton soup.
Most of which were from Tony, who'd been showing enough signs of life after the trip to Austin that Steve had started to hope a little, despite knowing better. He replied to the last one only, saying that he'd been on a mission and wasn't ignoring Tony intentionally. Tony replied immediately resenting the unintentional aspect even more.
A few texts were from Bruce, including one musing that he supposed he should be grateful for this glimpse of the old, hyperactive Tony. There was a picture of a bowl of tortellini from Miranda, to which he replied with a picture of the fork in the container of General Tso's chicken entirely because she'd be appalled. There was also a reminder that he had a dentist's appointment on Friday.
He ate his dinner while reading Sports Illustrated and ignoring the phone vibrating in the bowl he'd put it in (under a dish towel) because Tony was apparently feeling chatty and turning it off again would just encourage him.
Steve called Tony back after he'd put the leftovers in the fridge, at which point he found out that Tony not only could turn his phone on remotely, he could activate the video camera and had spent five minutes trying to figure out where the phone was before recognizing the dish towel.
"Once upon a time, you helped remove all of the remote surveillance in my apartment," Steve reminded him. The answering cackle was surprisingly good to hear.
"Is this an intervention?"
Steve sighed. "No, Tony." He slouched down and crossed his legs at the ankles underneath the conference table. The three of them -- him, Tony, and Pepper -- were in Fury's office, waiting for Hill and Fury and whoever else was supposed to be here, and until they showed up and the meeting began in earnest, he didn't have to exhibit any kind of proper posture. "I don't think that would serve much purpose at this point."
He knew the actual reason for the meeting, knew why Tony didn't know and Pepper did -- they were part and parcel -- and understood why Fury had wanted them both there. Although he didn't necessarily agree with the staging, he did agree with the purpose behind it and so here he was when otherwise he'd be back in Brooklyn, changed into running gear and trying to sweat out the emotionally charged morning he'd had.
Captain America had helped ring the Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange, the first day the repaired building had been used for trading since the Triple Bombing (temporary quarters had been used since the markets had reopened four days after the attacks). He'd stood among a party of survivors and the bereaved, holding the baby brother of Graciela Flores, the third-grader from the Bronx who'd been the youngest victim of the bombings and whose smiling school picture had become the iconic image of who had really been hurt when HYDRA had waged its war on "capitalism and its mercenary army."
The opening of the Stock Exchange at 9:30 had come after a moving ceremony out front on Broad Street that had revealed the memorial to the victims. Mindful of the still-incomplete work going on a few blocks away at the World Trade Center site, there had been pressure to have something done quickly. The memorial, a simple inscribed plinth supporting a cube of video screens that rotated through pictures of the victims submitted by their families and friends, was probably not what Steve would have gone with, but it seemed to be very well-received by the families and the newspapers hadn't savaged it too badly, so it would do. The Broad Street subway station would get its own memorial, but the station wasn't anywhere near ready yet. It would be sooner than the Cortlandt Street station destroyed on 9/11, however, so nobody had so much as complained.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Steve rolled his neck slowly, waiting for the pop, before looking over at Tony, who in turn looked like he wasn't sure if he should be preparing for a fight but suspected he should be. Pepper had been reading something on her tablet and looked up at Tony's words and then back down at what was on her screen. She'd witnessed these scenes often enough that she didn't need to watch.
"It means that you already know what everyone thinks and you don't care and everyone knows that you don't care," Steve said evenly. "Your pain is still more important to you than the pain you're causing others and until that changes, there's nothing worth intervening in."
Tony recoiled, but recovered quickly, glancing over at Pepper before returning his attention to Steve. "Wow. Been saving that one for a while?"
The words were supposed to have been waspish and snarky, but Tony couldn't hide the wounded undertone and seemed to realize it, so he stopped talking.
Steve closed his eyes and tilted his head back. He hadn't said anything that he hadn't already both discussed with Pepper and said to Tony, although this was undoubtedly the soberest Tony had been while hearing it. Maybe this time it would matter. As much as he hurt for Tony and understood that there were parts of what had been going on that Tony couldn't control, there were parts that he could but would not and that had frayed Steve's patience, another thread snapping every time he saw tears in Pepper's eyes or went on a mission where Iron Man could have been useful or could have saved a life.
The glimpses of the old Tony, infrequent but less rare than they'd been a month ago, probably made things worse. Tony's improvement since Austin -- still checked by backsliding -- sometimes seemed like it was for the wrong reasons. Tony had been inspired by Maya Hansen and Extremis because it tied in to his aspirations for Iron Man, not because he wanted to repair the damage and hurt he'd done to himself and to others over the last several months. He was replacing one false balm with another.
The door to the outer office whispered open and Fury, Hill, Tapper, and someone who was introduced as Yeowell from FININT came in. Steve suspected the last two had been waiting in the chairs Hsiang had positioned so that she could sit in judgment of those who'd approach the throne. He pushed up into a semblance of attentiveness. Hill gave him a quick look and her eyes flicked over to Tony, who was still sulking, and then back and he shook his head minutely; everything was fine. This was Tony being reflective, not Tony about to have a tantrum.
Once everyone was seated, Fury told Yeowell to begin, but to keep it brief and to only use words that everyone would understand.
Yeowell, a young, earringed man with heavily gelled hair, smiled. "Bottom line up top: after sifting through the evidence recovered during the last six months of HYDRA raid, we have added almost sixty names to the list of companies with ties to HYDRA. Last week, we added the biggest one yet: Trident Corporation."
Tony dropped his crossed arms and pushed back from table slightly, exchanging a look with Pepper that Steve could not decipher. He had known about the Trident connection almost since FININT had come up with it, but had sat on it until Fury had made up his mind on when or if Tony should be told. Steve watched him now, a tiny bit wary but mostly feeling like he was watching a friend open the best Christmas present ever. Tony's eyes were alight with something between glee and validation.
"Really, now," Tony said conversationally. "Please go on."
Yeowell smiled happily and, without waiting for Fury, started to explain: SHIELD's focus on the paper trails had finally paid off. Partial tracking numbers -- and the occasional complete one -- were harvested from the shipping labels and receipts and whatnot found at all of the sites raided throughout the world. Each one was searched against the shipping companies' databases -- Fury had gotten access to those through arm-twisting and unveiled threats -- and the resulting list of possible origin points and destinations, necessarily large because tracking numbers had so many permutations, was cross-referenced with its siblings.
"It's really easy to get a false positive off one or two or even five partials," Yeowell warned, pre-empting questions about why it had taken so long to find Trident's name on that list. "We didn't want to jump the gun. It's how you end up with newborn babies on the No Fly List. Google and Apple and Stark Industries, just to name a few, popped up all the time because they just ship so much stuff. We initially put Trident in the same category of likely exceptions, but eventually we were forced to give them a closer look after they popped up in a couple of other categories of accumulated physical evidence.
"On this closer look, we were able to show that over a hundred packages were being shipped to HYDRA or HYDRA-affiliated destinations on one of Trident's account numbers. There's plausible deniability here -- shipping accounts get misused all the time -- but the volume is high enough and the tonnage heavy enough that if Trident's accountants haven't noticed, they're either incompetent or complicit."
There was more to the story -- and Yeowell was willing to tell it until Fury told him to shut up and sit down -- but the main point was that Trident very likely was working with the enemy. Whether they were doing it for their own gain -- at Stark Industries' expense -- or out of genuine belief in HYDRA's cause, SHIELD did not know. And, not unimportantly at all, they also did not have the kind of hard evidence that could be used to make Trident pay in any court in any land.
"We're sharing this with you now, Stark, because it's very likely that you, through your company, are their target," Fury said. "And as such, we'll need your assistance to further the investigation. We will need this done quietly and without a whisper within Stark Industries' walls or into the ear of a useful reporter to goose the market."
Tony looked to protest, but Fury's expression made him reconsider. Everyone knew that Tony and Pepper had a stable of sympathetic media types that they'd use for all sorts of reasons, personal and corporate. Steve had benefitted from it himself, getting the bloggers who were convinced that Captain America lived in DUMBO to reconsider the logic of their assertions.
"You'll have whatever you need, Director," Pepper assured. "From both of us."
After more details were discussed, the meeting ended and Steve followed Tony and Pepper out of the office. They had flown to the Helicarrier by helicopter and Pepper had offered Steve a ride back to Stark Tower, which he'd accepted before they'd gone in to Fury's office and now was wondering how awkward it would be. He tried to take his cue off of Tony, but Tony was quiet, lost in thought. He looked over at Pepper, who gave him a tiny shrug.
"Why did you bring me in on this?" Tony asked as they rode the elevator up to the flight deck. "We both know that Pepper's going to be the one doing all of the snooping around the company files for Fury. Who would have been happy to deal just with Pepper. Who did not fake her surprise very well at all at these revelations, by the way."
Pepper looked completely unrepentant.
"Because you deserved to know, Tony," Steve said simply. "Evil people have been methodically destroying your life and if you wouldn't believe me or Pepper when we told you, maybe you'd believe it from people who don't like you nearly as much."
The elevator doors opened to a glorious sunset over New Jersey, orange and rose melting seamlessly into cerulean and lavender. And then the noise of the carrier deck hit them.
"I knew this was an intervention," Tony said smugly as he stepped outside. He turned back to Steve. "You staying for dinner? Marcel's doing a spring lamb."