Location: The Triskelion, Washington D.C.
The conference room on the forty-second floor of the Triskelion was designed to make people feel small.
The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, offering a panoramic view of the Potomac River and the monuments beyond, effectively framing the world that S.H.I.E.L.D. was sworn to protect. But inside, the air was pressurized, recycled, and cold.
Director Nick Fury stood at the head of the obsidian table, his back to the view. He wore his trademark long leather coat, his single eye scanning the room with a predatory patience.
Seated before him were the architects of modern warfare.
To his left sat Agent Phil Coulson, hands clasped over a tablet, his expression one of polite anticipation. Next to him was Deputy Director Maria Hill, her posture rigid, a bluetooth headset blinking on her ear.
On the right side of the table, the atmosphere was sharper. Brock Rumlow, commander of the STRIKE team, leaned back in his chair, picking at a splinter on the table edge, his energy coiled and bored.
Next to him sat Clint Barton, 'Hawkeye', who was currently disassembling and reassembling a specialized arrow tip, eyes focused on the mechanism, ignoring the room.
And at the far end, isolated by choice, sat Natasha Romanoff.
The Black Widow.
She was perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the blank holographic projector in the center of the table.
"We waiting on the Pope, or is this just for dramatic effect?" Rumlow muttered, flicking a piece of lint off his tactical vest.
"Read the room, Brock," Barton said without looking up. "Silence is part of the briefing."
Fury turned, palms hitting the table with a heavy thud.
"The world's getting noisy," Fury began, his voice a low baritone that cut through the hum of the air conditioning. "Billionaires in tin cans. Green rage-monsters tearing up Virginia. Everyone's looking up at the sky."
He tapped the console. The hologram flickered to life. It showed a rotating 3D model of a half-constructed skyscraper in New York City.
"But while everyone's watching the fireworks," Fury continued, "someone is down in the gutter, taking out the trash."
The image shifted. Crime scene photos.
"Three months ago," Fury listed. "Shen Xung. Triad heavy. Found cooked in a sauna in Macau. Ruling? Thermostat malfunction. Two weeks later: Marco Delgado. Cartel money man. Choked on his own dinner. Anaphylactic shock."
Fury swiped the air, accelerating the timeline.
"Viktor Eusaff. Arms dealer. Carbon monoxide leak. Senator Patrick Vane. Heart attack at a gala—toxicology flagged it as natural causes, but the beta-blockers in his cabinet were sugar pills laced with epinephrine."
"And finally," Fury pointed to the screen, which now showed the construction site from Hell's Kitchen. "Anatoly Ivanov. Last week. Crushed by gravity."
Barton finally looked up. "I read the Ivanov file. NYPD said the locking pin sheared. Metal fatigue."
"Metal fatigue my ass," Rumlow snorted. "Pins don't just give up on a Tuesday. Someone helped it."
"Exactly," Fury said. "Gravity doesn't target someone. But this one? This one does."
Fury swiped the air again. A grainy dashboard camera feed appeared. Hell's Kitchen.
A man in a dark suit walking away from a fire, calm, unhurried.
"Four months," Fury said. "Twelve corpses, maybe many more. We don't fucking know. High value, low profile. No brass, no footprints, no witnesses. Just a string of really bad luck."
"It's a cleaner," Natasha said softly. Her eyes hadn't left the screen. "Or a ghost."
"Ghosts don't rig cranes, Romanoff," Rumlow countered. "That's an engineer. A mechanic."
"He's not a mechanic," Fury said. "More like a fucking scalpel."
The hologram changed. Instead of a crime scene, it showed a flight path map over the Atlantic Ocean.
British Airlines Flight 404.
"Last night," Fury announced. "AccuTech engineer Julian Ashford was found dead in his seat upon landing at Heathrow. Official cause of death: Cardiac arrest brought on by stress and alcohol."
"AccuTech?" Coulson asked. "Stark's subsidiary? They just announced that Exoskeleton project."
"Ashford was the leak," Fury confirmed. "He was selling the weaponized blueprints to a warlord in Sokovia. He had the data on a hard drive cuffed to his wrist."
Fury zoomed in on the image of the first-class cabin.
"When the authorities opened the briefcase, the hard drive was there. But the data was corrupt. Replaced with dummy files."
"So someone swapped it," Barton surmised. "Mid-air?"
"It gets better," Fury said. "We recovered the flight data recorder. At 35,000 feet, the cockpit emergency hatch was blown manually. The cabin pressure dropped, pilots were incapacitated—not killed—and the plane went into a dive."
"And who landed it?" Hill asked.
"The autopilot," Fury said. "Re-engaged manually from the pilot's seat after stabilization. The flight descended normally and taxied to the gate like nothing had happened. Passengers just thought it was severe turbulence."
Fury tapped the table.
"Someone boarded that plane, eliminated Ashford without waking the passenger next to him, secured the data, engaged a hostile who boarded mid-flight—we're still tracking that stealth signature, by the way—threw said hostile out of the plane, stabilized the bird, sealed the breach, and then walked off at Heathrow with the rest of the civilians."
"He stopped a plane crash and treated it like a minor inconvenience," Rumlow said, sounding impressed despite himself. "That's... tight."
"Who is he, Nick?" Hill asked.
"A freelancer," Fury answered. "And I know this because I'm the one who bought the ticket."
The room went dead silent.
"You hired him?" Hill asked, incredulous.
"I sanctioned a stress test," Fury corrected calmly. "I needed the AccuTech data secured. And I needed to see if the 'Urban Legend' could operate in a zero-margin environment."
"You put him in a tube at 35,000 feet as a stress test," Barton smirked. "Bold strategy, boss."
"And he didn't just survive," Fury said. "He thrived. He completed the objective, neutralized a threat we hadn't accounted for, and saved the civilians. Minimal collateral. Maximum efficiency."
"He sounds expensive," Rumlow grunted. "I like him."
"He's not for sale," Natasha said abruptly.
The temperature in the room seemed to drop. Natasha stood up and walked to the hologram.
"Zoom in," she ordered. "On the passenger manifest photos. Seat 2A."
Coulson tapped the console. A passport photo appeared. A bald man with a sharp jawline and piercing blue eyes.
Natasha stared at the face. Then she looked at Fury.
"Do you have a rear angle?" she asked. "Surveillance from the airport?"
"No CCTVs caught him," Fury admitted. "He knows the angles. But we got lucky. Pure dumb luck."
Fury brought up a grainy image.
It wasn't a security feed. It was a selfie taken by a teenage girl in the arrival terminal. In the far background, blurred and small, was the back of a bald head disappearing into the crowd.
Fury swiped again. Another image. Hell's Kitchen. A skateboarder's footage, frozen on a microsecond frame, where a suited figure was visible on a rooftop edge.
"Just a random baldy," Fury muttered. "Until we enhanced the resolution."
He zoomed in on the neck.
Just above the collar. The barcode.
640509-040147
"I know this signature," Natasha said. She sounded hollow. "It's a bedtime story from the Red Room. The Wolf Spider Program. The Male counterpart to the Black Widow Ops. Genetic engineering, cloning, all the biology bullshit."
"A clone?" Hill asked.
"A graveyard," Natasha corrected. "Hundreds of subjects. Genetic rejection. Death. They didn't want an army. They didn't want a super soldier. They wanted the perfect assassin. He's not a person... A weapon with a pulse."
She looked at Fury. "When I defected... when I burned the Red Room down... I rigged the Sector 4 facility myself. I buried that program under ice and concrete. I thought I killed him before he ever took a breath. I was wrong."
"We were taught that if the project were ever finished... if we saw him," she added, looking at Fury, "you don't fight. You ran. Because if you saw him, you were already a corpse."
"Well, the passengers and crew of Flight 404 are still breathing," Rumlow argued. "So maybe your boogeyman is a myth after all."
"Or he's disciplined," Barton countered. "Restraint is harder than a body count, Brock. You know that."
Fury nodded. "Exactly. He has a code. A logic. He's not a psychopath. He's a sociopath who's currently out for more of my money. Apparently, the job had some complications, and now, he's trying to bleed me dry."
Fury killed the feed. The room went dark.
"The Avengers Initiative's purpose is to assemble a team of extraordinary individuals to defend Earth from large-scale threats that conventional forces couldn't handle," Fury said, pacing the length of the table. "But the world still has its dirty little secrets. Corporate cabals. Dictators. Loose ends. S.H.I.E.L.D. can't be seen taking out the trash. We have oversight. We have optics."
"You want a janitor," Coulson said.
"I want a ghost," Fury corrected. "Exclusive retainer. Targeted application of force. Deniable. Untraceable."
"He won't join," Natasha said. "You can't recruit him with a speech about saving the world, sir. He doesn't care about the world. I don't think he cares about anything at all."
"Everyone has a price," Fury said. "Money. Protection. Or maybe just the name of the people who made him."
Fury looked at Rumlow. "Brock. Assessment."
Rumlow shrugged. "He's precise. Fast. But he's a solo act. You put him in the STRIKE team, he'll leave them behind or use us as bait. But... you point him at a problem and walk away, no strings attached? Yeah. He's useful."
Fury looked at Barton.
"Hawkeye?"
"Perfect assassin... right, Nat? Well, maybe they were right," Barton said, respecting the craft.
"The flight stabilization alone? He knew the manual for the Boeing 787. That's prep. That's dedication. But Nat's right. He's not a soldier. A soldier fights for the guy next to him. This guy fights because the check cleared. If you hire him, make sure you pay on time, boss."
Fury turned to Natasha.
"And you, Romanoff? You're the only one here who speaks his language."
Natasha looked at the reflection of the bald man in the glass table. She saw the similarities.
The silence. The control.
"He's dangerous, sir," she said. "The Red Room broke us to make us weapons. But them, they were made to be a weapon. There was nothing that could be broken. If you try to put a leash on him, he'll take your arm off."
"I'm willing to risk the arm," Fury said. "But I'm not sending a SWAT team. That's a declaration of war."
Fury tapped the table. A file appeared. Profile: Wolf Spider.
"I need someone to make contact," Fury said. "Someone who can walk into his world without tripping the alarms."
His eye locked onto Natasha.
"He's in New York. We tracked the secure upload from the flight data to a relay in Queens. I've already planned an extraction. Assess him. Bring him in."
"And if he says no?" Natasha asked.
"Then we find out if the stories are true," Fury said coldly. "Barton, overwatch. Do not engage unless Romanoff is compromised. Rumlow, STRIKE team on five-minute standby."
"You want me to offer him a job," Natasha clarified.
"I want you to offer him a purpose," Fury said. "He kept a copy of the AccuTech data, Romanoff. He's leveraging us. I like that. It means he's thinking. Go get our ghost."
Natasha stood up, smoothing her jacket.
"If this goes sideways," she warned, "don't expect a clean report."
"I never expect clean," Fury smiled, a thin, dangerous expression. "I expect done."
As the team filed out, Coulson lingered.
"Sir," Coulson said quietly. "Stark is volatile. Banner is a time bomb. Now this guy? We're not building a team, sir. We're building a powder keg."
Fury looked out at the Washington Monument.
"We're not building a team for a parade, Phil. We're building a wall. And sometimes, you need a few monsters on the wall to keep the others at bay."
Fury turned off the lights.
"Get the jet."
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