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Inside the truck, Brock Rumlow handed the crucial sample to one of his men. “Take this to the extract,” he said, meaning the point where they would meet the buyer and leave Lagos. “We’re not going to outrun him. Lose the truck.”
“Where are you going to meet us?” the gunman asked. He stowed the sample in a duffel bag.
Rumlow’s answer was grim. “I’m not.”
Sam was in the air, soaring over the crowded streets. He saw the truck swerve and crash into a row of stalls at the edge of a market square. Four men spilled out the back of the truck and ran, trying to disappear into the crowd. Sam didn’t see Rumlow. “I got four,” he said. With the help of Redbird, he’d found them using facial recognition software. “They’re splitting up.”
“I got the two on the left,” Natasha said. She had “borrowed” another motorcycle and was swerving through traffic. She saw two men running ahead, but stalled cars blocked her path. Dumping the bike, she ran across the cars’ hoods and wove through the crowd after them.
Cap reached the crashed Humvee a moment later and saw a vest and other equipment from Rumlow’s men scattered around the street. “They ditched their gear,” he said, scanning the area. Panic was spreading in the crowd, and he couldn’t pick out the targets in the sea of running people. “It’s a shell game now. One of them has the payload.”
He made a guess where Rumlow’s men had gone and had just set his feet to take off after them when he heard Rumlow himself call out from near the crashed Humvee. “There you are!”
At the same moment, a magnetized grenade clanked on to Cap’s shield. Instantly, he threw the shield up into the air. High over the square, the grenade exploded harmlessly, blasting Cap’s shield away into the crowd.
“I’ve been waiting for this!” Rumlow growled. He charged forward at Cap, and the fight was on.
Sam tracked the two gunmen until they came out into an open space at the back of the market square. He swooped down and slammed into the lead man, plowing him into the ground. Then, getting a little extra lift from his extended wings, he spun and laid the other guy out with a double kick. Quickly, he rifled through their pockets. Nothing. “He doesn’t have it. I’m empty,” he reported.
Hearing that, Natasha ran harder, shouting at people to get out of her way. She caught up with the fleeing pair of Rumlow’s gunmen in a side street lined with market stalls. Jumping over the nearest stall, she scattered its wares on the ground as she tackled the closest gunman. He went for his gun, but she held his arm and knocked the breath out of him with a flurry of gut punches. Then she spun toward the second man, closing in as she knocked the gun out of his hand with a heavy woven basket. She took him down hard, scissoring her legs around his neck and twisting him to the ground. His gun bounced free. Natasha went for it and came up, whirling around to see that the first man had his own weapon back. It was a standoff.
“Drop it,” Rumlow’s other man commanded from her left. Natasha leveled her gun. He was holding the vial stolen from inside the lab. “Or I’ll drop this.”
Natasha didn’t know what was in that vial, but she knew Rumlow wouldn’t have shot his way into the institute for something unless it was very, very dangerous. “Drop it!” Rumlow’s man shouted again.
His partner looked as nervous as Natasha felt. “He’ll do it!” he said.
Natasha hesitated. She couldn’t let them escape with the vial. But what was the best way to . . .
Sam solved the problem for her. His birdlike drone dipped into view and, with a single shot, dropped the gunman holding the vial. Natasha shot the other man in the arm and dove forward in a desperate lunge. That vial could not be allowed to hit the ground. At full stretch, she caught the vial inches from the ground and landed hard, clasping it and breathing a sigh of relief. “Payload secured,” she said. “Thanks, Sam.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said as he flew into view. He nodded at the drone hovering between them.
She shook her head. “I’m not thanking that thing.”
“His name is Redwing,” Sam said.
“I’m still not thanking it.”
Catching up to them, Wanda looked at Redwing with a little smile. “He’s cute,” she said. Natasha rolled her eyes.
Cap had forced Rumlow to turn and fight, but this wasn’t the same Brock Rumlow he’d known before. Rumlow had pneumatic gauntlets that gave him the power to hit like a truck, and he barely flinched at punches that would have put an ordinary man in the hospital.
“Come on!” Rumlow taunted him after knocking Cap flat and pounding him with a series of punches that left the Avenger bruised and staggered. He stomped the ground as Cap rolled away and got to his feet. He hit Cap again and forced him up against a wall. “This is for dropping a building on my face,” Rumlow said. A blade snapped out from one of the gauntlets. Rumlow stabbed it at Cap’s head, but the other man dodged and Rumlow’s gauntlet buried itself wrist-deep in the wall. Cap grabbed the gauntlet and ripped it off. Rumlow raised his other hand, showing another blade. He swiped at Cap, who leaned back and used the motion to start a spinning kick that knocked Rumlow across the street, where he crashed into a patio table in front of a restaurant.
Cap knew Natasha had the biological sample. It was time to put Rumlow down and start figuring out what it was . . . and who Rumlow was stealing it for.
But Rumlow wasn’t fighting back. He got to his knees and took off his helmet, showing his heavily scarred face. As Cap approached, Rumlow looked up at him, defiant and full of hate . . . but Cap could see sadness, too. And pain. “I think I look pretty good, all things considered,” Rumlow said.
Cap didn’t care to chat with Rumlow. Why had he quit? “Who’s your buyer?” he asked.
“Your pal, your buddy. Bucky.”
Cap wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but he couldn’t believe that . “What did you say?”
“He remembered you. I was there. He got all weepy about it, until they put his brain back in the blender. He wanted you to know something. He said to me, ‘Please tell Rogers . . . when you gotta go, you gotta go.’ ” Rumlow’s grin got bigger. He showed Cap a small detonator switch in his fist. “And you’re coming with me.”
Cap started to flinch back from the explosion as Rumlow squeezed the switch, but then something incredible happened. Instead of blasting out to engulf Captain America and everyone else in the area, the explosion churned and rumbled around Rumlow. Cap saw the telltale wisps of red energy and looked back to see Wanda Maximoff with her hands outstretched. Scarlet Witch held the explosion’s burst in check, her hands out and cupped in front of her. Then she lifted Rumlow and the fireball up into the sky, meaning to let it go off harmlessly.
But Rumlow’s bomb was more powerful than she’d guessed. When she released it, the explosion tore through several floors of a nearby building. Smoke poured from the building’s shattered windows, and debris fell into the street. The people who had been running from the battle now turned their shocked faces up to see what the Avengers had done.
This was bad. Instantly, Cap started trying to keep it from getting worse. “Sam, we need fire and rescue on the south side of the building.” He ran to help. The last thing he saw was Wanda, looking up at the burning building with an expression of horror on her face.
It was 1991. Tony Stark’s mother, Maria, was singing and playing the piano. She stopped playing and looked over as Howard Stark pulled a blanket off Tony, who was stretched out on the couch. His parents had asked him to come home from MIT and watch the house for a weekend. “Wake up, dear. Say good-bye to your father.”
“Who’s the homeless person on the couch?” Howard cracked, holding up the blanket.
Tony got up and adjusted his Santa Claus hat, his way of displaying some holiday spirit. “This is why I love coming home for Christmas . . . right before you leave town,” Tony shot back.
“Be nice, dear,” his mother admonished. To Howard, she said, “He’s been studying abroad.”
Howard didn’t seem impressed. “Do me a favor,” he said, pulling the hat off and tossing it on the couch. “Try not to burn the house down before Monday.”
Now standing, Tony nodded with mock seriousness. “Okay, so it’s Monday. That is good to know. I will plan my poker party accordingly. Where are you going?”
“Your father’s flying us to the Bahamas for a little getaway,” his mother said.
“We might have to make a quick stop,” Howard added.
“At the Pentagon, right?” Tony asked. He couldn’t resist making a crack about his father’s secret military business. “Don’t worry. You’re going to love the holiday menu at the commissary.”
Howard looked at him, and Tony felt all the old conflicting feelings: love, resentment, and frustration. “You know, they say sarcasm is a metric for potential,” Howard said. Tony turned his back and walked away to the other side of the room. “If that’s true, you’ll be a great man someday.” He waited a beat, then turned to Tony’s mother. “I’ll get the bags.”
“He does miss you when you are not here,” Maria said quietly to Tony, trying to lessen the tension. “And frankly, you’re going to miss us. Because this is the last time we’re all going to be together. You know what’s about to happen. Say something. If you don’t, you’ll regret it.”
She was right. Tony turned to his father and said the things he’d never been able to persuade himself to say in real life. “I love you, Dad. And I knew you did the best you could.”
And then the adult Tony Stark appeared, observing the hologram projection of his younger self and his long-dead parents.
“That’s how I wished it happened,” he said. “By Barely Augmented Retro Framing, or BARF—I got to work on that acronym—an extremely costly method of hijacking the hippocampus to clear . . . traumatic memories.”
Tony leaned on the piano. The hologram rippled and flickered into a jigsaw pattern of pixels. Then the Stark living room as it had been in 1991 was gone. He was standing in an auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was being honored as a famous graduate. The stage was just white cubes and a stand‑in piano, to give the simulation some tactile reality. The emotional moment he’d just shown them . . . It had never happened. Not that way. It was all a simulation, and that was what he was there to talk about. He’d built the BARF system to re‑create memories so people could experience them again and try to confront them by doing things they’d never been able to do in real life. It was a great piece of tech, but it wasn’t making him feel any better.
“It doesn’t change the fact that they never made it to the airport, or the things I did to avoid processing my grief,” he said. Taking off his glasses, Tony looked out over the audience. They were hanging on his every word.
“Plus,” he added, “six hundred and eleven million dollars for my little therapeutic experiment. No one in their right mind would’ve ever funded it. The challenges facing you are the greatest mankind has ever known,” Tony said. They were silent, maybe hoping for some story about one of the Avengers’ battles. But Tony wasn’t here for that.
He shifted his weight, setting up for the speech’s big finish. “Plus most of you are broke,” he said, getting a small laugh. “Or rather, you were. As of this moment, every student has been made an equal recipient of the inaugural September Foundation Grant.” A few gasps sounded from the crowd as certain people guessed what this meant. For the rest of them, Tony spelled it out. “As in, all of your projects have just been approved and funded.”
The auditorium erupted in wild applause. Over the pandemonium, Tony called out, “No strings. No taxes. Just . . . reframe the future.”
Then he paused as the teleprompter showing his speech mentioned Pepper Potts. A shadow passed over his face, and he stopped following his prepared remarks. “Starting now,” he said. “Go break some eggs.”
He walked off the stage, leaving behind a lecture hall full of very happy students. The professor in charge of the event met him in the wings. “That, uh . . . that took my breath away, Tony. So generous, so much money. Out of curiosity . . . will any portion of that grant be made available to faculty? I know, gross, but hear me out. I have got this killer idea for a self-cooking hot dog. Basically, a chemical detonator embedded . . .”
Tony didn’t want to hear it. Seeing Pepper’s name had shocked him. “The restroom is this way, yeah?” he asked, pointing down the hall.
The professor nodded as an assistant strode up to him. “Mr. Stark, I am so sorry about the teleprompter. I didn’t know Miss Potts had canceled. They didn’t have time to fix it,” she said.
“It’s fine,” Tony said, waving the apology away. “I’ll be right back. We’ll catch up later.”
In the bathroom, Tony splashed some water on his face and looked in the mirror. He’d helped a lot of people today. That felt good. But the report from Lagos was heavy on his mind, and coming on top of losing Pepper . . . he was frazzled. Not that he could blame her. Not really. Tony had loved her, but she couldn’t always rely on him, and both of them knew it. Now she was gone.
After Tony took a minute to get himself together, he headed for the elevator. In the hall outside the bathroom, a middle-aged woman was waiting for him. A fan , was his first thought. They were always finding him in unexpected places. “That was really sweet, what you did for the young people,” she said.
“Oh, they deserve it,” he said, and meant it. “Of course, it helps to ease my conscience.”
She nodded. “They say there’s a correlation between generosity and guilt. But you got the money. Break as many eggs as you like. Right?”
Tony wasn’t sure what to say about this. He touched the elevator’s call button. “Are you going up?”
“I’m right where I wanted to be,” she said, and reached into her purse. Alarm bells went off in Tony’s head, and he took a step forward to grab her wrist.
She didn’t struggle. She just looked at him. “Okay, okay,” he said, and stepped back again. “I’m sorry. It’s an occupational hazard.” The longer he worked with the Avengers, the more Tony had started to see threats everywhere. He was jumpy, overtired.
She slapped a photograph into his chest and held it there until he accepted it. “I work for the State Department. Human Resources. I know it’s boring. But it enabled me to raise a son. I’m very proud of what he grew up to be.” Tony felt a terrible sense of dread that he knew what she was about to say. “His name was Charlie Spencer,” the woman went on. “You murdered him. In Sokovia. Not that it matters in the least to you. You think you fight for us. You just fight for yourself. Who’s going to avenge my son, Stark?” she asked, pinning him with her angry gaze and leaning hard on the word avenge . “He’s dead. And I blame you.”
She walked away. Tony held the picture of Charlie Spencer. For one of the few times in his life, he had no idea what to say. Because no matter how he sliced it, Charlie Spencer’s mother was right. The Avengers had killed her son.
It was 1991. Tony Stark’s mother, Maria, was singing and playing the piano. She stopped playing and looked over as Howard Stark pulled a blanket off Tony, who was stretched out on the couch. His parents had asked him to come home from MIT and watch the house for a weekend. “Wake up, dear. Say good-bye to your father.”
“Who’s the homeless person on the couch?” Howard cracked, holding up the blanket.
Tony got up and adjusted his Santa Claus hat, his way of displaying some holiday spirit. “This is why I love coming home for Christmas . . . right before you leave town,” Tony shot back.
“Be nice, dear,” his mother admonished. To Howard, she said, “He’s been studying abroad.”
Howard didn’t seem impressed. “Do me a favor,” he said, pulling the hat off and tossing it on the couch. “Try not to burn the house down before Monday.”
Now standing, Tony nodded with mock seriousness. “Okay, so it’s Monday. That is good to know. I will plan my poker party accordingly. Where are you going?”
“Your father’s flying us to the Bahamas for a little getaway,” his mother said.
“We might have to make a quick stop,” Howard added.
“At the Pentagon, right?” Tony asked. He couldn’t resist making a crack about his father’s secret military business. “Don’t worry. You’re going to love the holiday menu at the commissary.”
Howard looked at him, and Tony felt all the old conflicting feelings: love, resentment, and frustration. “You know, they say sarcasm is a metric for potential,” Howard said. Tony turned his back and walked away to the other side of the room. “If that’s true, you’ll be a great man someday.” He waited a beat, then turned to Tony’s mother. “I’ll get the bags.”
“He does miss you when you are not here,” Maria said quietly to Tony, trying to lessen the tension. “And frankly, you’re going to miss us. Because this is the last time we’re all going to be together. You know what’s about to happen. Say something. If you don’t, you’ll regret it.”
She was right. Tony turned to his father and said the things he’d never been able to persuade himself to say in real life. “I love you, Dad. And I knew you did the best you could.”
And then the adult Tony Stark appeared, observing the hologram projection of his younger self and his long-dead parents.
“That’s how I wished it happened,” he said. “By Barely Augmented Retro Framing, or BARF—I got to work on that acronym—an extremely costly method of hijacking the hippocampus to clear . . . traumatic memories.”
Tony leaned on the piano. The hologram rippled and flickered into a jigsaw pattern of pixels. Then the Stark living room as it had been in 1991 was gone. He was standing in an auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was being honored as a famous graduate. The stage was just white cubes and a stand‑in piano, to give the simulation some tactile reality. The emotional moment he’d just shown them . . . It had never happened. Not that way. It was all a simulation, and that was what he was there to talk about. He’d built the BARF system to re‑create memories so people could experience them again and try to confront them by doing things they’d never been able to do in real life. It was a great piece of tech, but it wasn’t making him feel any better.
“It doesn’t change the fact that they never made it to the airport, or the things I did to avoid processing my grief,” he said. Taking off his glasses, Tony looked out over the audience. They were hanging on his every word.
“Plus,” he added, “six hundred and eleven million dollars for my little therapeutic experiment. No one in their right mind would’ve ever funded it. The challenges facing you are the greatest mankind has ever known,” Tony said. They were silent, maybe hoping for some story about one of the Avengers’ battles. But Tony wasn’t here for that.
He shifted his weight, setting up for the speech’s big finish. “Plus most of you are broke,” he said, getting a small laugh. “Or rather, you were. As of this moment, every student has been made an equal recipient of the inaugural September Foundation Grant.” A few gasps sounded from the crowd as certain people guessed what this meant. For the rest of them, Tony spelled it out. “As in, all of your projects have just been approved and funded.”
The auditorium erupted in wild applause. Over the pandemonium, Tony called out, “No strings. No taxes. Just . . . reframe the future.”
Then he paused as the teleprompter showing his speech mentioned Pepper Potts. A shadow passed over his face, and he stopped following his prepared remarks. “Starting now,” he said. “Go break some eggs.”
He walked off the stage, leaving behind a lecture hall full of very happy students. The professor in charge of the event met him in the wings. “That, uh . . . that took my breath away, Tony. So generous, so much money. Out of curiosity . . . will any portion of that grant be made available to faculty? I know, gross, but hear me out. I have got this killer idea for a self-cooking hot dog. Basically, a chemical detonator embedded . . .”
Tony didn’t want to hear it. Seeing Pepper’s name had shocked him. “The restroom is this way, yeah?” he asked, pointing down the hall.
The professor nodded as an assistant strode up to him. “Mr. Stark, I am so sorry about the teleprompter. I didn’t know Miss Potts had canceled. They didn’t have time to fix it,” she said.
“It’s fine,” Tony said, waving the apology away. “I’ll be right back. We’ll catch up later.”
In the bathroom, Tony splashed some water on his face and looked in the mirror. He’d helped a lot of people today. That felt good. But the report from Lagos was heavy on his mind, and coming on top of losing Pepper . . . he was frazzled. Not that he could blame her. Not really. Tony had loved her, but she couldn’t always rely on him, and both of them knew it. Now she was gone.
After Tony took a minute to get himself together, he headed for the elevator. In the hall outside the bathroom, a middle-aged woman was waiting for him. A fan , was his first thought. They were always finding him in unexpected places. “That was really sweet, what you did for the young people,” she said.
“Oh, they deserve it,” he said, and meant it. “Of course, it helps to ease my conscience.”
She nodded. “They say there’s a correlation between generosity and guilt. But you got the money. Break as many eggs as you like. Right?”
Tony wasn’t sure what to say about this. He touched the elevator’s call button. “Are you going up?”
“I’m right where I wanted to be,” she said, and reached into her purse. Alarm bells went off in Tony’s head, and he took a step forward to grab her wrist.
She didn’t struggle. She just looked at him. “Okay, okay,” he said, and stepped back again. “I’m sorry. It’s an occupational hazard.” The longer he worked with the Avengers, the more Tony had started to see threats everywhere. He was jumpy, overtired.
She slapped a photograph into his chest and held it there until he accepted it. “I work for the State Department. Human Resources. I know it’s boring. But it enabled me to raise a son. I’m very proud of what he grew up to be.” Tony felt a terrible sense of dread that he knew what she was about to say. “His name was Charlie Spencer,” the woman went on. “You murdered him. In Sokovia. Not that it matters in the least to you. You think you fight for us. You just fight for yourself. Who’s going to avenge my son, Stark?” she asked, pinning him with her angry gaze and leaning hard on the word avenge . “He’s dead. And I blame you.”
She walked away. Tony held the picture of Charlie Spencer. For one of the few times in his life, he had no idea what to say. Because no matter how he sliced it, Charlie Spencer’s mother was right. The Avengers had killed her son.