“Huh,” Tony mused.
“Huh?” Ava asked.
Natasha’s brain was racing. “I mean, it’s a long shot, but it worked for the Spartans, didn’t it?”
“Hold up. The Spartans had digital signatures? And the Green Dress Girl would be the messenger?” Ava looked puzzled. “Why would she agree to do that?”
“If this goes down the way I hope it will, she’ll never know.” Natasha drum-rolled the table with each of her idle fingers. The adrenaline was kicking in. “We’re not asking her, we’re being her. At least, as far as our hacker friend knows.”
“Of course. It’s so obvious, now that you put it like that.” Tony had no problem keeping up with her in the operational calculus department, but then, he liked to hang out at Large Hadron Colliders. She smiled.
“Obvious how?” Ava asked.
“Obviously, if we jack the signal coming from the tracker N-Ro planted on Green Dress Girl, it should pick up her network whether or not we can locate it. It’s our back door into whatever she’s using to encrypt her communications with the hacker—as long they’re communicating,” Tony said. “Nice.”
Natasha was still figuring it out as she spoke, which also meant the tabletop was still rattling. “There’s a chance she might not notice if we get in and out quickly enough. We piggyback on her wireless, use it to send a message through her own network to him, then track his location when he responds.”
“If they’re in contact, he’ll get it. You’re some kind of evil genius,” Tony said, approvingly.
“If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work,” Natasha said. “Still, we might as well try. If Green Dress isn’t the person who directly hired Maks Milosovich—”
“You mean, if she’s a cutout,” Ava interrupted.
Again with the vocab. “Sure.” Natasha smiled. “Even then, there’s still a chance she reports to whoever put out the contract.”
“Especially if its Krasnaya Komnata,” Ava said. “Which we can’t be sure of. And she could also just be onto us—she could have found the tracker and ditched the signal already. For all we know, she could be manipulating us into a trap.”
“Either way, it’s worth a shot,” Tony spoke up. “Seeing as, you know, we don’t have any others. The Brazilians aren’t exactly jumping to share the feed from their street surveillance cameras with us, my excellent relationship with local law enforcement notwithstanding….”
Ava looked at Natasha. “He’s right. We’ve got nothing else.”
Natasha pushed back her chair and stood up. “Then it’s settled. We hack the hacker.”
Hours later, the penthouse wall monitor was covered with lines of illegible code, all leading up to a single, blank text box.
UNSUB:
Now they just had to compose a fake message to an unknown hacker from a girl they also didn’t know.
Tony worked remotely from Geneva via the monitor. Natasha sat at the weird white table on the side of the room, the one with the bottom shaped like a vase. Ava sat on the hard leather rectangle of a couch.
“The message has to be simple, almost generic. We don’t want to duplicate a past transmission,” Natasha said, staring at the screen.
“And we don’t want to expose ourselves by getting some obvious detail wrong,” Tony agreed, his voice projecting over the visible text.
“Like we’re catfishing.” Natasha nodded. “When impersonating someone online, less is more.”
Tony thought about it. “So what’s something our hacker can’t double-check?”
“Something he’s afraid of?” Natasha wondered.
“Some breaking news?” Ava asked.
“Nothing too big. Nothing he’d react to in a way that she’d notice,” Tony said.
Ava thought about it. “A joke? A meme? An emoji?”
Natasha snorted. “Seriously?”
“Come on, N-Ro, are you telling me you can’t give that idea three trophies and a cat with heart eyes?” Tony flashed her a thumbs-up onscreen.
“You think you’re going to smoke out our hacker and maybe the entire Red Room by texting them a little iron and a man?” Natasha said, annoyed.
“And a big green fist?” Tony said. “I wish.”
“The emoji would have to be yellow,” Ava corrected him. “Or brown. There’s no green fist.”
“Try telling that to the people who have seen it,” Tony said with a smirk.
“Forget emojis. I’m not tweeting our hacker, either.” Natasha sat back down in her white tulip chair. “Hashtag: So Black Widow.”
“Hashtag: Black Panther Is Lit.” Tony smiled.
“Hashtag: When Old People Make Hashtag Jokes.” Ava sighed.
Natasha frowned. “I somehow don’t think any of this will do it.” She eyed the massive screen. “What else?”
“Okay, wait. I got it. Perfect.” Tony typed—only two letters and a single punctuation mark—
UNSUB: HA!
“Ha?” Natasha stared at him. “That’s your big idea?”
“Not ‘Ha?’ It’s not a question. Bolder. It’s an assertion. ‘HA!’” Tony repeated.
“I don’t get it.” Ava looked puzzled.
“Trust me. I use that ‘HA!’ all the time.” Tony sounded confident.
“Why?” Natasha asked. “For what?”
“Pepper wants an answer from me and I don’t have time to read some codrafted eyeball-numbing ninety-page brief on whatever a team of junior analysts think Stark Industries’ latest widget crisis is? I write back ‘HA!’” Tony winked at Ava. “Focus issues, remember?”
“And that works?” Ava looked interested.
“Sure. Someone wants me to pull resources from my Like Minds R&D think tank? HA! Buy an island? HA! Get Iron Man to take out a foreign government? HA! It’s perfect.”
“It is?” Ava asked.
“Nobody ever knows what you mean—but they think you think they do and they don’t want to admit they don’t—so it buys you a full week, minimum.” Tony grinned. “I bet they don’t teach you that at Stanford Business School.”
Ava looked at Natasha. “It’s your call. He lost me back at widget crisis.”
“Ha!” Tony replied. “See?”
Ava swallowed a smile.
“We could try it, I guess. Seeing as it doesn’t matter what Maks says, just where his transmission originates from,” Natasha said, finally. “I can’t see that we’d have that much to lose.”
“Is that a yes?” Ava asked.
Natasha regarded the blinking letters.
SEND MESSAGE_Y/N
“Okay. Fine. Do it,” Natasha said.
“You’re sure?” Ava asked.
“No,” Natasha said, sitting forward. “But do it anyway.”
They heard the wheels of Tony’s desk chair squeak—and as the cursor on the screen flashed to Y, the text box disappeared.
The screen went black.
It suddenly seemed a little anticlimactic. “Now I guess we wait,” Natasha said.
Ava kept her eyes on the screen. “I’m just trying to remember how this whole Trojan-horse thing turned out for Troy.”
“Back then, I’m pretty sure it all came down to which god was on your side.” Tony’s voice echoed down from the monitor. “So you’re in luck. The folks at Troy had Neptune. You kids have me watching your back.”
“Lucky us,” Natasha said. Then the screen unexpectedly lit up again—
KOS_16: HA?
Natasha froze. Ava sprung to her feet and moved closer to the screen.
“Tony?” Natasha said, raising her voice. “You seeing this?”
Tony’s voice was low. “Oh yeah. He took the bait. That was fast.”
“So that’s our guy?” Ava asked.
“Looks that way. Which means our friend Maks was just sitting there waiting for her to reach out,” Natasha said.
“That, or he’s a habitual social media butterfly,” Tony said. “That’s a hard habit to break.”
“Some o
f us manage,” Natasha said.
Tony grinned from the bottom of the penthouse screen. “Either way, I’m on it. Tracing the signal back down to Earth now.”
Natasha could hear the sound of Tony’s fingers flying across the keyboard, all the way over on the other side of the world.
“Okay. Got it,” he said, finally. “We’re looking at…South America…Brazil…Pernambuco…and the winning city is…Recife. A cell tower near the beach, to be exact. Got the address…right…here.” He was positively beaming. “You’re welcome.”
Ava looked at him in shock. “You mean that worked?”
“As soon as you’re finished congratulating yourself—” Natasha began.
Tony interrupted, “Deleting our phony message from Green Dress’s server now.” He hit a final keystroke. “Ah…HA!”
Natasha stood up and began to pace. “We don’t have long. Maks probably changes location every few days. I know I would.”
“Maks Mohawk’s not a field agent,” Tony pointed out. “He’s a hacker. Which means his first priority is his online footprint, not his IRL one. For all we know, the guy is hitting the same Starbucks for his Flat White every day.”
“Even so, we’ve got to get there before he figures out what just happened,” Natasha said.
“Sending you his address,” Tony said, hitting another key.
“No. Let’s keep this offline. I’ll get a pen and write it down,” Natasha said, quickly.
“Why?” Ava looked spooked. “You think they’re still in our network?”
Natasha shrugged. “We’re in theirs, aren’t we?”
Ava shivered.
“You’re overthinking this,” Tony’s voice crackled back at them. “Just go pick up our pal Maks Mo. We’ll put the screws on him when you get home. You’ll get your answers.”
“You got it,” Natasha said. She just hoped they got there in time. And that Maks Milosovich has something to tell us.
Now the words disappeared from the screen—three trophies and a cat with hearts for eyes in their place.
And Tony’s voice: “Knock him dead, Sparta.”
Natasha was already halfway out of the room. “Thanks, Helen.”
Nobody was laughing now.
S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY
CLEARANCE LEVEL X
SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES & INDIVIDUALS (SCI) INVESTIGATION
AGENT IN COMMAND (AIC): PHILLIP COULSON
RE: AGENT NATASHA ROMANOFF A.K.A. BLACK WIDOW
A.K.A. NATASHA ROMANOVA
AAA HEARING TRANSCRIPT
CC: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, SCI INQUIRY
COULSON: So that’s when you made your move from Rio to Recife?
ROMANOFF: We took off that afternoon. Two and a half hours by chopper. Up along the coast to Espírito Santo and Bahia, then cut inland to Pernambuco.
COULSON: That’s a long way to go based on a single hacked transmission.
ROMANOFF: It only took three words for Turing to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code.
COULSON: So that’s what this was now? Another world war?
ROMANOFF: I was playing the only hand I had, Phil.
COULSON: Hands come and go. Take it from a guy who knows. Boom.
ROMANOFF: At that point, we were just trying to stay in the game.
COULSON: So—did things turn out like you expected?
ROMANOFF: I never have expectations, Coulson. You know that.
COULSON: They say that’s the key to happiness.
ROMANOFF: Low expectations?
COULSON: Or cats. I hear some people really like ghost cats.
ROMANOFF: I’m more interested in birds, maybe Black Hawks. I like my pets damage-tolerant and full-spectrum crashworthy. And heavily armed.
COULSON: In that case, you’re probably wise to stay away from kittens.
COULSON: So hunting Maks Mohawk brought you to the Recife airstrip?
ROMANOFF: Well, we weren’t there for the ghost cats.
COULSON: I’m guessing this hacker wasn’t damage-tolerant, either.
ROMANOFF: Not exactly, no.
RECIFE, STATE OF PERNAMBUCO,
BRAZIL
COMFORT HOTEL UZI RECIFE
There was nothing like hugging a few walls to introduce a person to the painful world of surveillance, or so Ava had learned. Hug enough of them and you’d pick up a few things pretty quickly. Jagged bricks could cut like a knife; soft plaster could cave in on top of you. Wood splintered into your skin; stucco bit through your clothes. Whitewashed cinder block was the South American standard, but in this particular alley, no one had even bothered with the wash.
“Yeah, because no one ever sees this place,” Alexei said. He had appeared as soon as they’d landed, and seemed to be in no hurry to leave. “Which is exactly why my sister picked it, right?”
Ava blew the hair out of her eyes. She knew better than to answer when Natasha was this close. Even at that moment, Natasha raised a hand above her shoulder and pulled it into a fist. Hold up. She’d been in full operations mode since they landed on the dirt airstrip outside of the city.
“I’m holding, I’m holding,” Ava muttered behind her. They waited as a spluttering motorcycle passed them by, then began to move again, all the while flattening themselves against the back of what now appeared to be a sleazy hotel’s parking garage—the location for their current mission.
Natasha edged one combat-booted foot forward at a time, keeping her eyes on the building in front of her. COMFORT HOTEL UZI RECIFE. The lit neon letters ran unevenly down the side of the concrete structure.
“Check out that name.” Alexei laughed.
“Seriously?” Ava whispered. “I mean, I know the Comfort part is a joke, but Uzi?”
“Zip it,” Natasha answered, looking over her shoulder.
Ava whispered back. “Our guy’s on the run and he’s staying in a dump named after a machine gun?”
Natasha shrugged. “It’s not like he named the place.”
Ava raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? What’s next, the Marriott Kalashnikov?”
“No, I got it,” Alexei grinned, poking her in the ribs. “The Motel MI6?”
She tried not to look at him.
“What’s next is that we have work to do,” Natasha answered, still eyeing the lit windows of the building. A stray cat watched them lazily from its perch on top of the parking-lot wall, too sluggish from the heat to move. Ava didn’t blame her; it was well past midnight and the weather was still unbearable; this time of year, it was only after the sun went down that the Brazilian day began.
“Can you blame them? I’m so hot I want to die, and I am dead.” Alexei sighed.
Ava ignored him again.
Traffic had picked up considerably since they’d staked out the alley; she could hear the cars crowding down the busy avenue that separated the front of the hotel’s concrete box of a building from the brightly lit sand of Boa Viagem, the popular section of beach on the other side. Now and then, screams drifted over the road, followed by cheering. A football match in the sand, she guessed; many Brazilian beaches became football fields at night.
Oh, Alexei, you would have liked that.
“I did. I still do.” Alexei smiled at her.
Ava caught her mind drifting—a realization that was inevitably followed by self-loathing. She bit the inside of her cheek and fixed her eyes on a random balcony in her line of vision. Focus: they were here for a fast recon, actionable intel, and a casualty-free, close-quarters grab and bag. Nothing all that out of the ordinary.
Even if Alexei was extraordinary, she thought.
“Don’t be such a goof.” Alexei frowned at her. “You don’t have to do this for me. You don’t have to do anything for me. I would rather have you be safe.”
You need to go away. I can’t do this with you in my head.
She dug into the tender skin between her thumb and forefinger until it throbbed with pain.
I have to focus. Right now—
Alexei disappeared
.
She turned her attention to the current op. She had watched how carefully Natasha had plotted it, as always; there was more to a Black Widow than a steady eye and a deadly shot. People seldom realized that there was a whole lot about the S.H.I.E.L.D. life that nobody ever talked about—dreary necessities, primarily involving research, math, and Google Maps. Line-of-sight and field-of-fire calculations. Probability algorithms and casing reports. Supplies and tactical plans. Hugging walls and waiting for orders and lurking around alleyways in tropical weather…
The fun stuff. Good times.
Ava eased up her cramping legs, stretching until she stood tall. She was hot, sweating through the thin material of her black field suit—lighter than the usual combat gear. Ava thought they looked like they belonged on a safari rather than an urban beach, but as usual, Natasha could care less. Now the agent kept her eyes trained on a lit window cut from the concrete, two floors up.
Ready and wound to eleven, Ava thought. Natasha had been like that, lately—ever since Rio. If we come up empty again, she’s going to snap.
Natasha glanced over her shoulder to Ava, lowering her voice. “All right, then. You keep your eyes on the prize while I reach out to our new friend.”
Ava nodded, looking past her to the balcony.
Natasha pulled a small black box out of her utility belt, and pressed a button like it was a remote on a television. She looked up to the building in front of her…and as she did, the illuminated letters spelling out the name of the hotel went dark. So did the hotel windows, the crumbling concrete balconies, even the streetlights on either side of it.
Everything but the moon, Ava thought when she saw it.
She was surprised. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s remote kill switch lived up to the name; it basically turned off the world around them.
An improvement, in this dump of a neighborhood.
“What do you think? Thirty bucks a night in this place? That’s what I’m going with.” Ava studied the row of now-dark hotel balconies. “Are we a go?”
“Thirty? Really?” Natasha raised an eyebrow. “Because I have to say, this is more like a twenty-buck alley. Twenty-five, tops.” Over on the beach someone must have scored another goal, because as she spoke, the cheering floated on the breeze into the alley.
Black Widow: Red Vengeance (A Marvel YA Novel) Page 6
