As he made his way through a darkened alley, Logan dwelled on something that had occurred to him when they were first attacked. It wasn’t just him they were after. They wanted Mystique, too. They already had Sabretooth and Maverick, and they wanted Wolverine. But Mystique had never been a member of Team X.
He had no idea what the motive for these attacks and abductions was, but now at least he had the first clue. Now, at least, he knew where to trace it all back to.
“East Berlin,” Logan said, sipping at a foamy pint. “You remember?”
“Of course I do,” Mystique replied.
She looked even better than before. Copper skin and eyes the color of milk chocolate. Logan had known a woman once with similar features; Lettie, her name was. But Mystique was even more beautiful. Perfect. When she shapeshifted into someone like a homeless person, her disguise was impenetrable. But when she took on personas like this, there was the one thing that gave her away to someone whose eyes were trained to look for her: she was too perfect.
“That was a long time ago, Logan,” she said.
“Not to whoever has this vendetta against us, darlin’,” he replied. “I’ve had my fill o’ mysteries, Mystique. It’s a game I quit playin’ a long time ago. Let’s see if we can’t get to the bottom o’ this quick.”
“Well,” Mystique said, cocking her head to one side and tapping long red fingernails against her satin cheek, “who else was involved with that fiasco?”
Logan was up and moving toward the pay phone in the back of the White Horse even before Mystique finished the thought. She followed, sipping at her scotch.
The phone rang half a dozen times before the machine picked up.
“You have reached Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” Emma Frost’s regal voice declared. “At the tone, you may speak.”
Bleeeep!
“This is Logan. I need to speak to …”
There was a click as someone picked up the phone on the other end.
“Wolvie!” Jubilee said excitedly. “Where are you, can you come—”
He was about to interrupt when he heard Jubilee complain as the phone was taken from her.
“Logan.”
“Emma,” Wolverine replied, with as much courtesy as he could muster.
Which wasn’t a lot, when it came to Emma Frost. He trusted her even less than he did Mystique. But these were strange times, and that made for strange alliances.
“I need to talk to Irish,” Logan drawled. “It’s important.”
There was a brief silence on the other line, then a dry chuckle.
“Yes, well, we’d all like to talk to Sean right now,” Emma replied. “Sadly, he isn’t here at present.”
Wolverine felt a cold fire blaze up in his gut.
“He’s been taken?”
Logan could hear Frost’s surprise over the phone.
“What … how did you … what’s this all about, Wolverine?” she demanded. “That wasn’t just a lucky guess. What are we talking about, here?”
“Don’t bother yourself, Emma. I’ll see to it Irish gets home safely,” he said coldly, and hung up the phone on her angry shouts.
He let out a long breath and turned to face Mystique. Their eyes met briefly, and he wondered what was going on in her head. Wondered if she knew more than she was letting on. But he’d never know until she wanted him to—of that he was certain.
Mystique knocked back what was left of her scotch.
“So how do we find the Russian?” she asked. “She’s no longer with the Avengers.”
“You want to find the spider, you go to the web.”
They waited outside the Upper West Side high-rise until they saw an obese woman in a garish yellow dress approach the doorman inside and reprimand him for something. After which she strutted from the building and hailed a cab. Obviously a tenant.
Sixty seconds after the cab pulled away, they walked across the street to the front of the building. Mystique had changed again—rolls of fat in yellow polyester, hardly the perfection she favored—and for the first time in the many years since he had first met her, Wolverine wondered if it tired her at all.
The doorman plastered a ridiculously false smile across his face and opened the door for them.
“Mrs. Hastings?” the doorman inquired, feigning concern. “Anything the matter?”
“Should something else be the matter?” Mystique sneered. “Or haven’t I suffered enough?”
The doorman’s jaw dropped. Apparently Mystique had been even harsher with him than the real Mrs. Hastings. Logan had to smile. Mrs. Hastings would have a very chilly reception when she actually did return.
They walked to the elevator without the doorman so much as glancing at Logan. After the doors closed, and the elevator began to glide up the metal gullet of the high-rise, Mystique changed once more. Not to her true form, but a more human appearance, in case someone else should board the elevator on its way up.
Wolverine thought she seemed greatly relieved to leave the body of Mrs. Hastings behind.
They reached the top floor of apartments and left the elevator. They would have needed a key to unlock the elevator’s security and get it to bring them to the penthouse, which had been their destination all along. Instead, Logan padded down the hallway in silence, Mystique following his lead. Though he wore street clothes, he suspected that his leather and denim might be out of place in this corridor of wealth.
At the end of the hall they came to the emergency stairs. No alarms here, he noted, and pushed on through. As he suspected, there were stairs leading up as well as down. The fire marshal wouldn’t be happy if the penthouse didn’t have stairwell access. They went up quickly and found a door at the top that had three separate barrel locks, and was more than likely wired with a complex security system.
“Maybe we should have called first?” Mystique asked.
Logan sniffed at the air.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Somethin’ don’t smell right,” he growled.
He reached out and touched lightly at the edge of the door. It opened an eighth of an inch. Wolverine pulled at the edge of the door, and it came open with the smallest of squeaks.
Mystique looked at him. He knew what she was thinking, and shared her observation. The soldiers after Natasha Romanova were quiet going in. That meant they might still be inside; Wolverine and Mystique would have to be quiet as shadows going in after them.
But they’d both spent years mastering the art of silence.
The apartment was elegantly decorated, but understated, almost Spartan. Logan didn’t kriow who paid for the digs— could have been the Avengers, S.H.I.E.L.D., even the Widow’s own money—but it hadn’t come cheap.
They emerged into a long hallway down which they could see where the elevator doors would open right into the penthouse. There were several rooms off the hall, but Wolverine didn’t catch any scent except the Widow’s and the intruders’. They moved along toward the wide arch across from the elevator doors. It opened into a vast foyer that might as well have been the interior of a mansion in Gramercy Park. Despite the dim light, they could see Persian carpets and huge green plants, paintings that had to be original, and carved hardwood columns.
Nothing broken. Nothing even obviously amiss.
Unless you looked at the stairs. Up the stairs, to the second floor of the massive penthouse. Unless you saw the burn marks on the carpet and the way the wall was shattered in several places in the stairwell, the way the banister had been cracked in two halfway up.
Without a word, they moved up those stairs. Three steps from the top, Wolverine got a good idea just how much damage the second floor had sustained. The Black Widow had not been taken without a fight, and it had been a good one. But, he was now certain, she had been taken. Otherwise, there was no way to account for the quiet. It had happened recently, though. It was near one in the morning now, and Logan figured no more than two hours since the Widow was snatched.
&nb
sp; He was about to tell Mystique exactly that when he heard the sound of a new clip being loaded into an assault rifle. It was a sound he was familiar with, but one he’d never really enjoyed.
Snikt. Logan popped his claws.
“Haven’t you done enough?” a voice growled from the shadows below.
Even as he turned and dove over the broken banister, falling down upon the man with the weapon with his claws ready to slash through gunmetal and flesh, Wolverine realized that he and the gunman had both made a mistake.
He retracted his claws even as the man fired. Two bullets tore into Wolverine before he could knock the assault rifle aside, even as the gunman crumpled beneath his falling body. The two of them sprawled on the floor together, the assault rifle still firing, tearing chunks of meticulously carved wood from the walls, punching holes in priceless tapestries and shattering windows thirty stories above Manhattan.
“Bastards, where is she?” the gunman roared as he gripped Logan’s jacket. “What have you—”
“Ivan, no!” Wolverine shouted.
Recognition lit the big man’s face, and he relaxed his grip. It was as though all the strength went out of him, and he let his head fall back to the Persian rug.
“Logan,” he said gruffly. “They took her.” Ivan Petrovitch closed his eyes. “Ah, Natalia Romanova, my prima ballerina, what am I going to do?”
Wolverine stood, stretched, heard the calcium pop in his neck and spine, then reached a hand down to help the old man up.
“Do?” he answered. “We’re gonna find her, Ivan. You can bet on it.”
They sat in the kitchen, sipping Earl Grey tea as Ivan recounted the events leading up to the abduction of the woman called the Black Widow. There was a massive bruise swelling to golf-ball proportions on the back of his head, where his salt and pepper hair was thinning.
“I did all I could,” Ivan said mournfully.
Wolverine only nodded. Ivan didn’t need to defend himself. The old man—and Logan couldn’t stop thinking of him that way despite the fact that, appearances aside, he was certainly older than Ivan—had taken care of Natasha for years. He’d been her father figure, her chauffeur, bodyguard, and source of wisdom since she lost her parents as a child. He loved her as much as any parent had ever loved a child.
Natasha Romanova had begun her life as a privileged little girl in Stalingrad, and grown up to become one of her nation’s treasured ballerinas. Between those lives, she had suffered tragedy, and Ivan had been a soldier whose own heart was empty of light. They had become family more than many families ever do.
To please the state, Natasha had married very young, still just a girl. Her husband, famed cosmonaut Alexi Shostakov, died soon after, and once more she wept in Ivan’s arms. In her grief, she was easy prey for the KGB, whose lies honed her into the perfect tool against the West. Her participation was against Ivan’s better judgement, but it was what she wanted, and he had never been able to deny her anything.
Only when the truth of Alexi’s death came out, and she began to see the web of lies and deceit that had been spun around her, did the Black Widow defect to the United States. Over the years, she’d been both spy and super hero, working as the former both for S.H.I.E.L.D. and on a freelance basis, as the latter on her own and with such teams as the Avengers and the Champions, even serving as field leader for both teams.
But none of those things concerned them now. If Wolverine was right, and he was as certain as he’d ever been, the Widow’s abduction went back to a time when she was still the KGB’s tool. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, at the time. Maybe younger.
But Ivan was there, as always.
Logan and Mystique just let him talk for a while, at first. Wolverine was surprised that Mystique was so patient, almost sympathetic. She watched Ivan closely, an odd look on her face. Logan wondered if it was envy, if she longed for the kind of unwavering dedication and love that Ivan so readily gave to Natasha. It was a strange thought. He’d never even considered that Mystique had feelings about anything before. Logan pushed away from that thought process. She might be working for the government now, but it wasn’t by choice. She was a criminal, a murderer, a terrorist.
That was all Wolverine needed to know. Or, at least, all he wanted to know.
“I don’t understand,” Ivan said, his usually very American, unaccented English now tinged with the memory of his homeland. “The Soviet Union is gone. The Iron Curtain is gone. The KGB is having enough trouble policing itself without worrying about one minor skirmish out of thousands at the end of the Cold War.”
Mystique interrupted. “Well, the soldiers who came after us seemed American enough, but they could be mercenaries working for a larger organization like A.I.M. or Hydra. But those groups don’t have any connection to this mission. It could be anyone behind this.”
“Even the KGB,” Logan observed.
“There are two major holes in that theory,” Mystique countered. “First, as far as I know, nobody but the Mossad and the members of Team X, and of course, Cassidy and the Widow, knew that I was involved in that mission. Second, the Widow was on the KGB’s side back then.”
“That was then,” Logan replied. “Natasha ain’t exactly on the KGB’s party list these days.”
Ivan nodded slowly, the lines around his eyes betraying his age far more than the white flecks in his hair and bushy mustache. He must be over sixty, Logan guessed. And yet the tall, stocky man was in extraordinary condition. It was rare for the average human being to have such discipline. But then, Ivan wasn’t really average. And he had Natasha depending on him, after all.
“They hate her now,” Ivan said. “Call her a traitor. But I just don’t see the sense in abduction versus murder. If it was revenge, they would just kill you all.”
“They want something,” Logan agreed. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s Mystique. Maybe it’s just information. But none of those things really point to the KGB.”
He glanced at Mystique. “Mossad?” he asked.
“I’ll make a few phone calls,” she replied. “But as far as the Mossad were concerned, that was a failed mission. My report was filled with lies anyway. They wouldn’t have had any real idea what happened.”
“What a surprise,” Logan drawled. “Still, you’d best make those calls, just to see if anything comes outta shakin’ the trees.”
Mystique rose to go to the phone, and Logan watched her go. He couldn’t help but wonder if she knew more than she was telling. Eventually, he’d find out, one way or another. Problem was, they’d both have to get a lot closer to the fire to find out who set it, and to see how badly they were going to get burned.
* * *
Maverick felt like throwing up. For the first few months, the Legacy Virus hadn’t been that difficult to live with. But recently, it had begun to show itself on his body and face, ravaging his skin in almost leprous fashion. And inside? God, all his insides felt like shattered glass. He’d always been a serious person, didn’t really have much of a sense of humor. Now he was grim simply because of the pain.
Living hurt.
But he was pretty sure he’d like dying even less, and so he fought the disease as best he could. There’d been a time when he wanted to die, even asked Wolverine to do it for him. Tried to force his old comrade-in-arms to take his life. That was panic for you, made you do crazy things. Suicide was a coward’s death, and David North had been many things in his life, but a coward was not one of them.
He grunted against the pain, lip curled back in a passable imitation of the savage whose arms and legs were clamped to the wall right next to him.
“You mockin’ me, boy?” Sabretooth snarled.
“You’re not worth the energy, Creed,” Maverick replied.
Then silence descended upon them again. There were four of them, all mounted to the wall like hunting trophies. Maverick raised his eyebrows as he realized that might be exactly what they were. Whoever had captured them all had gone to a lot of trouble an
d expense, and they’d yet to see this mysterious “benefactor.”
“Any of you seen restraints like this before?” he grumbled, and weakly tested his bonds, long metal sheaths that completely encompassed his legs from the knees down and his hands from midforearm to fingertips.
When he didn’t receive an answer, Maverick looked up to see that all three of his fellow captives were testing their own restraints, though all but one of them wore a metal suppression collar around the neck with a tiny red light at the front. The only one without it was Natasha Romanova.
The Black Widow strained against her bonds, muscles rippling across her arms and legs, perfectly visible through the skintight black costume she wore. North didn’t remember her being as beautiful as she was now. But she’d been a girl then, so maybe that was the difference. She was a woman now, a real heartbreaker.
It occurred to him that he was probably done with romance. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
Sabretooth roared and threw himself hard against his own bonds. Maverick heard something crack in the murderous savage’s left arm, and Creed winced. Maverick felt sick. The maniac had probably just broken his arm trying to escape—and with the collar suppressing his mutant powers, including his healing factor, the arm would stay broken for the forseeable future. Sabretooth was even more insane than he had been when they worked together on Team X.
On the wall to his right, next to the Widow, Sean Cassidy let out a wild scream, but it was nothing more than that. Maverick closed his eyes, and his stomach lurched once again. He thought of the hero in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” about the slashing of the razor pendulum and the gnawing of the rats on the man’s belly. Maverick figured he knew just what the poor sucker had gone through.
“Enough, Cassidy!” he grunted.
“Apologies, lad,” Cassidy replied. “I was tryin’ to see if me sonic scream was workin’, but it seems these restraints aren’t just for show. I’ve got a little power stored up but not enough to make a difference. This collar is sappin’ me mutant gifts, all right. I’ve seen such technology before. Magneto had such.”
Christopher Golden Page 6
