The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (11 page)

"See you in the car, then." Larry left without another word and Admiral Garza sat on the couch.

"Go ahead and finish your breakfast, Captain," he said.

Steve found that he wasn't hungry anymore. "If it's all the same to you, sir, I'd just as soon talk first," he said. "What's with the spook stuff?"

"I don't really have to tell you that, do I?" Garza said. "You know what we're doing here." I do, Steve wanted to say. And even though I think it's the right thing to do, something about it makes me sick to my stomach.

"Anyway," Admiral Garza said. "What I'm here about is the next step."

"The next step," Steve repeated.

"We've got the screeners in production, Steve. That's an important step. But already there's pushback from Altobelli; he's twisting all kinds of arms on the Hill to try and limit SKR's ability to sell and install the screen-ers. What needs to happen now is a concerted push on our part. We need to tell the American people that this can help protect them, and tell them that they need to get behind us so we can make this argument—their argument—in Congress and over the airwaves." Garza leaned forward and tapped Steve on the shoulder. "
You're
going to be critical to this effort. Americans feel like they know you, Steve. They admire you. The women have crushes on you and the men want to be like you." Steve's bullshit detector went off. "Admiral," he said. "With all due respect, you're laying it on a little thick."

"This is a pitch, Steve," Admiral Garza said. "You don't have to do a single thing I'm asking you to do. I can't order you around. All I can do is trust that you and I have similar ideas about what this country needs. Can I trust in that idea, Captain Rogers?"

The real question here, Steve thought, was whether Garza could trust Steve to do as he was told. Which was exactly the question he had been chewing over himself the night before. It was decision time. Could he commit to this, not knowing what exactly might come of that commitment later?

On the other hand, could he stop now?

Garza stood. "I can see you need some time to think," he said. "You know how to find me, right?" He started to walk toward the door, but stopped when Steve, too, stood. Admiral Garza turned to face him, and Steve said, "Admiral, I wouldn't have come this far if I didn't think we were doing the right thing."

Garza nodded as if he'd heard what he needed to hear. "Good, Captain. You're going to be needed as we move forward. I might ask you to come to Washington soon. Will you be able to navigate that with your commitments to SHIELD?"

"Yes, sir. I will."

Admiral Garza opened the door. "And we'd like you to meet some people in Los Angeles, too," he said before leaving. 'You won't mind a little fun in the sun while we save the world, right?" Sun Tzu probably said that somewhere, too, Steve thought, as the door swung closed. 16

For Janet Pym, the sudden change in Steve's behavior seemed like a relapse after all of the progress he'd made during the last year adapting to the twentieth century. For a while there, he'd almost seemed like a normal person... not that she could get judgmental about normality given her own, ahem, altered genome. But still, he was coming along, and in the aftermath of what she internally referred to as the Ant Incident, she'd needed someone. Needed him: strong, forthright, honest, confident. Even though she'd been cruel to him at first, he'd hung on, and now she was glad that she'd rewarded his persistence. She liked spending time with him, feeling his combination of naivete and chivalry wash over her and cleanse her of the trauma she'd suffered at Hank's hands. Or (more accurately and flippantly) the mandibles of Hank's minions.

Since the night they'd had dinner at Peter Luger's, though, he'd been different. Since a short time before then, really. Something had happened to him, and he'd been acting distant, even bitter. Some bitterness wasn't particularly strange for someone who had been through the upheavals Steve had, but she'd watched him get over it in the aftermath of the confrontation with the Chitauri; for a while after Arizona, he'd been positively basking in the adulation of twenty-first-century America, while still somehow retaining the boy-next-door quality that had attracted her to him in the first place. At Luger's, he hadn't been like that at all. Something had been on his mind, distracting him in the middle of sentences. He hadn't even commented on her dress, which she'd chosen specifically to provoke him because he was still such a fuddy-duddy about women's clothing. After dinner, he'd disappeared, saying he had something important to do, and she hadn't seen him since.

Janet sat back on her couch, TV on at low volume, glass of wine in her right hand and the fingers of her left drumming on her knee. It was almost time for the phone to ring. Every night at about eleven, Hank called her from wherever he was in Illinois. Every night she let the phone ring. He only called once each night, but he never gave her a night off either, and he left the same message, practically verbatim, each night.
Janet. Forgive me. I'm not asking you to forget, but please, I love you. Forgive me
. For the last week or so, Janet had begun to consider either taking out a restraining order or just picking up the phone. The first option would be great if successful, but might also provoke him into another rage. She shivered a little at the thought. The second might work out better in the long term, but talking to him... The phone rang.

Janet let it ring, and waited for the message. The machine clicked, and Hank said, "Janet. We need to talk. It involves... let's just say it involves Kleiser, and I need your help." Dead air stretched out. "Janet," Hank said again.

She picked up the phone, but did not speak.

For a third time, Hank said her name. "What?" she asked softly.

'You picked up the phone," he said, amazed.

"What do you want, Hank?"

"I—there isn't time to tell you everything," he said. "God, Janet. So good to hear your voice." No, she thought. We are not going down that conversational road. "Hank. What do you want? Why did you mention Kleiser?"

"Because two days ago a Chitauri tried to kill me in my lab." Hank paused. "Is this line secure?"

"Hell of a time to ask that question," Janet observed.

"You're right, never mind. The 'terrorist attack' in Illinois? Heard about it?"

"I read the papers, Hank."

"Then you'll notice that they didn't mention me. Or the Chitauri. They're back, Janet. There were survivors after Arizona, and now they're back. Fury knows about it. He was at my lab right after it happened doing the old scrub-and-shrug. Thor was there, too, God knows why. And your boyfriend. Uh, Steve."

Janet didn't know what to say. There was too much to respond to. Typical Hank. Throw out a jumble of conversation containing three or four things that needed to be addressed separately, and then pick the one you didn't address to get pissed about. "Are you okay?" Janet asked.

"Yeah," he said, and added, with real feeling, "I'm glad you asked."

"What happened to the Chitauri?"

"I killed it. Fury's probably got it in a tank by now. Janet, they must have told you something. Nobody will talk to me. "What's going on?"

She sat back on the couch. "Come on, Hank. You know I can't—"

"Fine," he said. "Maybe next time they'll kill me and you won't have to worry about it anymore."

"Oh, for God's sake. Do you... no. I am not doing this."

"Do you love him?" Hank asked.

"I'm not doing this," Janet said again.

"I wonder if I'm the only one it's happened to," Hank mused, his tone of voice suddenly different. She wondered if he was taking his meds, and appreciated once again how glad she was to have someone stable in her life now.

As she looked out her living-room window, she could see across the Williamsburg Bridge, and just about pinpoint the rough location of Steve's apartment farther away; not that she could see it directly, but a wasp always knows the way back to its nest, and she'd inherited some of that trait in the form of a nearly unshakable sense of bearings and distance. Right there, she thought... and then she heard Steve's voice on TV

"I have to go," she said to Hank, and hung up the phone.

Staring at the TV, Janet fumbled around on the coffee table for the remote. When she found it, she accidentally changed the channel, then started a DVD, then finally got back to where she was and got the volume up to where she could hear it without straining. Steve was speaking into a cluster of microphones against a banner backdrop she couldn't quite read from the angle of this network's feed: "... here today to lend my support to efforts to keep Americans safe through the immediate and widespread distribution of SKR TechEnt's screening technologies. After the terrorist attack in Wilmette, Illinois, two days ago—as well as other incidents and intelligence not publicly available—it's time to present a united front. Civil libertarians and ACLU types are going to raise hell and file their lawsuits, but the average American knows that now more than ever, it's critically important to maximize the protection of the public through surveillance and screening of public spaces. This is not Big Brother; the government isn't putting a dime or a single man-hour into it. This is the free market with a conscience, doing its job. If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about."

Steve's voice was swept under a tide of questions from the assembled reporters. A splash across the bottom of the screen announced the location as Los Angeles. "My God, Steve," Janet whispered. He was answering a question about why the Department of Homeland Security wasn't getting behind the screener tech. "Governments work slowly," was Steve's answer. "And sometimes events call for speed. Governments work through consensus, and sometimes events call for decisive leadership. I believe in America, and I believe in our government. In that order."

The phone rang. Janet let it. "Janet," Hank said on the machine. "Pick up. Janet. We've got to talk." The machine beeped.

She watched Steve take another six or eight questions, and with each answer she felt herself falling away from what she thought she'd known about him. "All enemies, foreign and domestic," he said. "We will protect this nation."

The phone rang again, and again Janet didn't pick it up. "My God," came Hank's voice. "You must be watching what I'm watching." There was a pause, and then he added, "That's some man you got there." Janet picked up the phone. "You go to hell," she said, and hung it up again. Then she unplugged it from the jack. She'd gotten a new cell, and so far he hadn't called her there, but she knew he'd find it if he really wanted to. In the meantime, she needed to think. And she needed another glass of wine. She ended up doing both thinking and drinking at the lab, where by approximately four in the morning she was in that exhausted interim space that lay at the end of too much work, too little sleep, and a bottle of red wine. She'd come down to finish the monthly update on the next-generation super-soldier project, which Fury was going to want tomorrow, and which meant Janet had to deal with Banner. Knowing all that, she'd decided to get it out of the way, file the report, and then sleep all day and let her dreaming brain figure out what to do about Steve.

Banner didn't sleep much; he was too depressed, and his physical cycles were too disrupted by all of the drugs keeping him from going green again. Janet had known this, but had counted on his morose self-pity to keep him from talking too much... but things didn't turn out exactly like she'd planned. Bruce was talkative and relatively unself-pitying, which was rare for him but made it hard for her to keep her own confused wallow going. Instead she found herself confiding in him from the other side of the transparent wall at one end of his cell, especially when they were opposite each other on either side of the exchange tray through which they passed various drafts and documents.

"You know Steve and I have been dating, right?" she asked while they were both running over the version of the report they planned to submit to Fury.

"Who doesn't?" Bruce said. "I'm the only one on the team without a girlfriend, so whenever anyone else gets maudlin, they come dump it on me."

"As if you're not maudlin enough," she said.

Bruce cracked a rueful smile, which was the only kind he seemed to be capable of "Careful there, Miss Wasp," he said. "That almost sounded like backhanded sympathy." The truth was that Janet did have a sort of backhanded sympathy for Bruce, even though he'd done one of the dumbest things she'd ever heard of when he shot himself up with Hulk juice mixed with super-soldier serum and destroyed much of lower Manhattan... because, he'd said at the time, he wanted to give the Ultimates a public enemy as a way of letting them show the American public what they could do. But weren't there enough real enemies? And was that Bruce's real reason? Janet had a feeling the real reason had a bit more to do with Betty Ross than Bruce had ever let on. God, she wanted to ask him about it; in his current mood, he might even tell her, which would sure liven up the report editing process... Janet bit her tongue. It wouldn't do any good to start talking to Bruce about that now. He'd be lucky if he ever saw the outside of the cell again.

"So what about Mr. Captain America, anyway?" Bruce wanted to know. Janet put down her pen. "He's different lately," she said. "He's had this harder edge the past few weeks, and then tonight I saw him on TV giving a press conference about this new—" She caught herself, wondering how much Bruce knew about the suppression of Tony's screener tech and its subsequent leak to SKR. No way was she going to be the first to tell him. In some ways the Ultimates as a group were like a bunch of third-graders where gossip was concerned, but this was one of the times, Janet thought, when you needed to know when to keep your mouth shut.

She shrugged. "Sometimes it seems like his whole patriotic thing is an excuse," she said, and wanted to go on, but wasn't sure what she might think it was an excuse for.

"Last refuge of a scoundrel," Bruce said.

"What?"

"Samuel Johnson said that," Bruce explained. "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." He must have seen her expression change, because immediately he started to backpedal. "Not that I think Steve is, you know—"