The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (13 page)

"How many other pieces of paper do you have in there, Doctor Pym?" Clint asked politely. Thor suppressed a grin; of any of them, Tony thought, he was the one used to having his motives questioned. Hank just rolled his eyes. It looked like he was on the manic side of one of his typical swings. Time to ensure that the whole thing stays civil, Tony thought. He was the last person who wanted to make nice with Plank Pym, but if Washington was going to step on his innovations and then farm them out to a bunch of yokels, the situation demanded a little extra effort. "It's good work, Hank," he said.

"It sure is, Doctor Pym," Fury agreed, and Tony saw a shift in his torso, as if Fury had almost shaken Hank's hand, which might have caused Tony to faint dead away from surprise. But Fury's discipline held.

"SHIELD extends both congratulations and thanks," he went on. "We'll gladly accept records of your experiments so we can continue on our own."

There was a moment of stunned silence.

Whoa
, Tony thought. So much for civility.

Hank's jaw literally dropped. "Nick," he said. "I thought... I mean... "

"And we'll be dismantling this lab," Fury said. He dipped into his pocket and came up with a check. "I think you'll find this is a generous consulting fee. Good luck in your work, Doctor Pym." As they filed off the command platform and out the front door, the tech team was already bringing in boxes and tools. Tony glanced back at Hank, just once, and wished he hadn't when he saw the devastating expression of betrayal and dashed hope on Hank's face.

19

"They did what?" Steve said. He couldn't believe it

"Wrote him a check and then took his lab apart." Clint was tearing off pieces of a pencil eraser and idly flipping them across the room, where they stuck in a bulletin board, finding creases even Steve couldn't see. "I've seen some dirty shit in my time, Cap, but that was about the coldest thing I'd ever seen someone do face to face. At least people who were supposedly on the same side." The pieces of eraser embedded in the bulletin board formed a pink connect-the-dots outline of an ant. Clint had gone through five erasers.

"Dirty stuff, huh?" Steve said.

"You don't even want to know."

Except Steve did. He was no babe in the woods, despite what all of these turn-of-the-millennium types seemed to think. He'd been in Europe during World War II, for Pete's sake. Still, there was a whole world of black-ops stuff that he didn't know much about, and something about his recent Washington experience made him want to know more. A good soldier learned everything he could about his enemy. Clint Barton would know about this kind of enemy: not the Chitauri, but the kind of enemy who worked through apathy and betrayal and perversion of the ideals that Steve held dear.

"What made you get out of it?" he asked Clint.

After a pause, Clint said, "Truth? I wanted to have a kid. And I wanted to be able to get up in the morning and feed my kid his Cheerios and know that I wasn't going to go off and spend the next two days doing things that would disgust him if he knew about them."

"You didn't get out of black ops before you had kids, though."

"No," Clint said. "No, I didn't. But I wanted to even then, and I wish I had. Not all of us have super-soldier serum in our consciences, Cap. Sometimes it takes a while for the doing to catch up with the wishing." He flicked his wrist and stuck his latest pencil in the ant's head. "Listen, why don't we have this conversation over pizza instead of in the office, you know?"

The next thing Steve said was one of the hardest things to say he'd ever encountered. "Truth?" He looked at Clint to see if Clint had picked up on the copying, but couldn't tell. "I think someone's listening at my apartment."

"Whoa," Clint said, and sat up straight. "You don't think they're listening here? Or are we talking about a different someone?"

"You know what? I think you're right about the pizza. Let's get out of here," Steve said. An hour later, they were munching on slices in Tompkins Square Park, surrounded by remnant freaks and moms with strollers. "You know what happened with the screener Tony invented," Steve said.

"I know he didn't get to make it," Clint mumbled around a mouthful of crust. "I try not to pay attention to political stuff. It's never paid off for me."

Wish I'd learned that lesson, Steve thought, and then realized that for a long time, he hadn't had to learn that lesson. He'd never been interested. But then came the long freeze, and the reawakening into this time when he was Captain America instead of the freak who was the butt of paratroopers'jokes... until they saw him in action. "Yeah," he said. "I don't know if it's paying off for me, either, but when that happened, I thought I had to do something."

Clint very carefully wiped his mouth and set his napkin on the paper plate he'd carried all the way from the place he'd suggested up on Avenue A and 14th. "Cap, I have the feeling you're about to tell me something I don't want to know," he said.

"Maybe," Steve said, and waited.

Clint leaned back on the bench and closed his eyes. "Oh, well," he said.

"I hate this," Steve said. "I hate that it happened, and I hate that I did it, but you know what? I try and I try, but I can't figure out a way to think that it was the wrong thing to do."

"You leaked it," Clint said.

"I leaked it," Steve said, and told him the rest of the story. When he was done, Clint cracked his knuckles and sailed the paper plate twenty-five feet into a trash can. Steve watched the long, sweeping arc, and thought: we all have roles to play. Then he remembered Fury, last week, saying that there were some things people didn't want to know.

"Why'd you tell me that?" Clint asked.

"Because you've seen people at their dirtiest," Steve said. "I—I need to know that I'm not one of those people. I did what was right, Clint. The Chitauri are out there. I killed one at Andrews. Andrews Air Force Base. And nobody wants to do what needs to be done."

"Oh, man," Clint said.

"What?"

"Nothing. Keep going," Clint said. "Tell me."

"When the people who should be trusted with these problems can't be trusted," Steve said, biting hard on every word, "what do you do? What does a soldier do?"

Clint shrugged. "I don't know. It's been a long time since I was any kind of soldier, really. Are you asking me about chain of command and manuals and that kind of crap?"

"No. Well, maybe. What I'm asking you," Steve said, "is what do you do when you know you have to do something wrong to do something right?"

Standing and stretching, Clint said, "Steve. I've heard this argument before. Usually when someone makes it, bad things happen not too long after."

"Sometimes they're right, though," Steve said. "The people who make those arguments." Clint shrugged and started walking back toward Avenue A. "Sometimes. I guess you'll find out." Steve sat there, thinking. Ten minutes later, he got a call from Admiral Garza. Ten minutes after that, he was in a limousine heading up the FDR while Garza briefed him on a new threat.

"The Chitauri have gone after the Triskelion, Pym's lab, and they've infiltrated Andrews," Garza was saying. He leaned forward and tapped on the window that partitioned off the driver's seat. The window whirred open, and Garza said, "Go ahead and hop on the Harlem River Drive, Kyle. We'll just do a circle while Captain Rogers and I talk."

"Yes, sir," the driver said, and the window whirred shut again.

"Anyway," Garza went on, "we've deployed surveillance teams on individual Ultimates, as well as some other SHIELD assets, and we've seen a couple of things that we wanted to pass along. I don't guess I have to tell you, Steve, that you're the one we trust right now."

"Yes, sir," Steve said.

"So we're going to take a little ride. Oh, and before we get there, I should tell you that the first screeners are coming out of the factory tomorrow. SKR's done a hell of a job." Garza clapped Steve on the shoulder. "I hope you're not having conscience troubles, Captain. What you did was difficult, but the right thing often is."

Exactly what I was just telling Clint, Steve thought.

The limo cruised along the Harlem River and looped around onto the West Side Highway. "Who's buying the screeners, sir?" Steve asked.

"Well, there's a couple of markets. There's some interest from airports, of course, and the primary market for this tech will be existing places that have screeners and think of these as an upgrade. But I'm sure you've already figured that there's a more hush-hush angle on the enterprise as well. We've got CIA and NSA networks arranging for installations at various targets we think the Chitauri might be interested in. Military facilities, government offices, and so forth."

"What about the Triskelion?" Steve asked. "After what happened... "

"Already in process," Admiral Garza said. "In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a heap of those screeners already sitting around in the Triskelion's basement."

Steve nodded. "Good." Remembering the carnage on the loading dock, he felt a flush of the fury he'd experienced then. However Tony's tech got out into the world, if it choked off the Chitauri until every last one of them had been hunted down and killed and preserved in ajar, the methods were justified. The limo turned off the West Side Highway and rolled through side streets before coming to a stop in front of a turn-of-the-century apartment building on 81 st Street. Looking out through the windshield, Steve could see straight down to the bulk of the American Museum of Natural History, and beyond that into the cool green of Central Park. "We're here," Garza said. "What I'm about to show you is... well, you're going to have to use your best judgment."

Garza opened a small drawer set under the front seats and took out a rectangular case of polished metal. It looked like the kind of box used to ship handguns on airplanes. Opening it, Garza removed a small machine that bore a resemblance to a gun. It had a handle and a trigger, but where the muzzle of a gun would have been was what looked like a microphone head.

'We've had our own geniuses working over the Stark tech," Garza said. "This is a handheld version. It's only a prototype, but lab results are promising. Let's go see how it performs in the field." They got out of the car, Admiral Garza stowing the handheld sensor in his coat pocket. All at once Steve realized where they were: in the next block, around the corner, was the apartment Janet had moved into after Hank Pym's last assault. Steve had only been there twice; Janet was still clearing things out of the old place, and the two of them were busy enough that they usually met up for dinner or a night out. Thinking of Janet reminded Steve that he hadn't spoken to her in a while. He'd been distracted, the good soldier leaving his girl behind when he went off to fight a battle. But he needed to keep in mind that Janet was a soldier in this battle, too. Not an easy trick when you'd grown up in the nineteen-thirties. Layered over his swirl of emotions about his relationship with Janet was a rising unease about why Admiral Garza had brought him here to show him how the new sensor worked. Reflexively Steve began scanning the surroundings for things that could be used as weapons. Most trash can lids nowadays were plastic.

Garza stopped at the corner and leaned in close to Steve. "How this works is, the lab boys have isolated a protein they think is the catalyst for the Chitauri ability to change shape. There's nothing like it in any human species, and this little toy is specifically designed to recognize and discard results that match up with terrestrial species that can mutate or regenerate. So it's not going to freak out if it runs across frog DNA, or a sign that a skink somewhere is regrowing its tail. Watch." He took the sensor out of his pocket and swept it in a semicircle on the corner. Passersby glanced over and then kept walking; this was New York, after all.

"Nothing," Garza said. "Right?"

Steve looked at the sensor. "I don't know, sir. What does it do when it gets a hit?"

"We've designed it for a quiet response, so a possible subject won't immediately know he's been tagged," Garza said. He started walking toward Janet's building, and Steve felt a rush of adrenaline start to flow through him. "When you see a little green light go on, right here, that's a hit." He pointed to a small LED

display about where the hammer on a gun would be.

"Admiral Garza," Steve said. "It's not an accident that we're walking toward Janet's building, is it?" Garza looked grim. "I'm afraid not, Captain. We've tagged one bogey around here. It's been disposed of, but I'm guessing it wasn't working alone." They had reached the building's front steps. "Look at this," Garza said. He pointed the sensor at the front door, near the knob. The little green light glowed. Dear God, Steve thought. Had they gotten in?

"That's the one we took out," Admiral Garza said. "We swept the area afterward, and traced it back to a bus stop over on Central Park West. We're still running down the bus." Steve had his phone out to call Janet, but Admiral Garza stopped him. "We're keeping a close eye on her, son. Right now she's at the Triskelion lab. I just wanted to bring you into the loop on this." Realizing he'd been holding his breath, Steve sighed. "I appreciate it, Admiral. Can we get more of those made? SHIELD sure could put them to good use."

"I'll see what we can do," Admiral Garza said. They turned away from the door and went back down the steps, Garza a step ahead of Steve. Right as Garza put a foot on the sidewalk, he said, "Captain." The light on the sensor was on. Steve looked up and down the street. There were no pedestrians on the block. Every nerve in his body on high alert, he watched Garza sweep the sensor out toward the street; the light went off When Garza turned the sensor back toward the building, it came on again, well before it was pointed near the doorknob.

Around the south side of the building was a narrow breezeway that ended in an eight-foot concrete wall. New York City was notoriously without alleyways, but here and there quirks of gas-main placement or lot shape had left these kinds of gaps. Steve and Admiral Garza moved slowly down the breezeway, Garza moving the sensor in a slow arc. "Right there," Garza said softly, as the sensor's light went on. He pointed at a metal grille covering a basement window, and went to the next grille. "Here, too." As the words left Admiral Garza's mouth, another sound almost drowned them out. From the courtyard behind the building, Steve heard the unmistakable rusty groan of a fire-escape ladder being dragged down to vertical. Before Garza could say another word, Steve had cleared the wall with a running jump, using his hands to pivot on the top of the wall so he landed beyond a row of flower pots against the inside. The world slowed and dilated into combat time, and on the second-floor landing of the fire escape he saw a human form just taking its first step up toward the third floor. Janet's floor. 20