3

In an abandoned factory next to a rail line in Moscow, Natasha Romanoff sat handcuffed to a chair. In front of her stood the general she’d been assigned to spy on, along with two of his goons. The general stepped up to her and slapped her in the face.

“This is not how I wanted this evening to go,”the general said.

Natasha said nothing. She was the Black Widow.

She wasn’t afraid. Even if no one on earth knew she was here, even if there was a thirty-foot drop to a concrete floor right behind her, she trusted herself to be able to handle it.

“I know how you wanted this evening to go,”she answered in Russian.“Believe me, this is better.”

“Who are you working for?”The general reeled off some names of his rivals.“Lermontov? Does he think we need to go through him to move goods?”

One of the goons leaned her chair back over the drop. She gasped.“I ... I thought General Solohob was in charge of the export business,”she said.

The general laughed.“Solohob? A bagman, a front. Your outdated information betrays you. The famous Black Widow, and she turns out to be simply another pretty face.”

Natasha pouted at him.“You really think I’m pretty?”

The general smirked and took a few steps away from her, to a table covered with tools. Natasha knew what those were for. She had no intention of letting the general get anywhere near her with them, but she needed him to keep talking.“Tell Lermontov we don’t need him to move the tanks. Tell him he is out. Well ... ”He picked up a torture instrument from the table. Switching to English, he said,“You may have to write it down.”

A phone rang.

One of the goons answered in Russian:“Da?”

Looking puzzled, he handed the phone to the general.“It’s for you.”

“You listen carefully,”the general growled into the phone—but he was cut off.

Even from her distance, Natasha could hear Agent Coulson’s voice. She had extraordinary hearing, part of her ... unusual training.“You’re at 1-14 Silensky Plaza, third floor,”Coulson said, getting right down to business.“We have an F-22 exactly eight miles out. Put the woman on the phone, or I will blow up the block before you can make the lobby.”

The general’s expression changed. Before he had been confident, cocky; now he was surprised that someone had found him ... and scared at the thought of a fighter jet with a missile aimed at him.

He put the phone on Natasha’s shoulder. Still handcuffed, she pinned it to the side of her head.“We need you to come in,”Coulson said.

“Are you kidding? I’m working.”

“This takes precedence.”

“I’m in the middle of an interrogation. This moron is giving me everything.”

The general looked puzzled.“I’m not ... giving everything,”he said, looking to his goons. They shrugged.

“Look, you can’t pull me out of this right now.”

“Natasha, Barton’s been compromised.”

The words sent a chill down Natasha’s spine. Not Clint ...

She kept her face calm.“Let me put you on hold,”she said.

The general reached to take the phone. As he got within range, she jabbed a heel into his knee. With a grunt of pain, he buckled forward, and she head-butted him, making sure he stayed down. Still with the chair on her back and with her hands cuffed behind her, she took out the goons with a quick series of spinning kicks. She even got to use the chair as a weapon, using its legs to smash the second goon’s foot and then jumping up in the air to land backward on him, smashing the chair to pieces and knocking him out. The first goon was just getting up after she’d laid him out, and she made sure he stayed down before strolling over to the general. He looked stunned and groggy, but things were about to get worse for him. She wrapped a length of chain around his legs and shoved him off the edge of the drop to the main factory floor. He fell and hung there fifteen feet above the ground. His rivals would find him sooner or later , Natasha thought.

Then she went back to the phone. As she walked, she picked up her shoes.“Where’s Barton now?”

“We don’t know.”Coulson said.

“But he’s alive,”she said, trying to make it a statement instead of a question.

“We think so. I’ll brief you on everything when you get back. But first you need to talk to the big guy.”

“Coulson, you know that Stark trusts me about as far as he can throw me,”she said.

“Oh, I’ve got Stark,”Coulson said.“You’ve got the big guy.”

Oh, Natasha thought. That big guy. She said something in Russian.