Natasha looked at Steve. "Metal arm — you said metal arm?"
"The whole right arm. Prosthetic, not a sleeve. He caught the shield one-handed."
"There were super soldiers at Rose Manor," she said. "During the Killian operation. One of them had a metal arm — it came up in Chen Haoran's after-action report."
Hill was already pulling up the file on her tablet. She found the section. "Confirmed. One of the Rose Manor super soldiers, unidentified, metal prosthetic on the right arm." She looked up. "Could be the same asset."
"At this level of capability, assets like that don't circulate widely," Natasha said. "It's highly likely."
The door opened.
Smith Doyle came in with Sharon Carter and Barbara Morse a step behind him. He crossed to the gurney without greeting anyone, looked at the white sheet for a moment, and lifted it.
He held a hand over the body, reading the absence of anything living underneath his palm.
Nothing.
He let the sheet fall back across Fury's face.
"Just like that," he said. Not a question.
Steve looked at him from across the room. "He came to my apartment already wounded. Someone hit him on the road before he reached me. At my place he was shot. I went after the shooter and while I was gone—" He stopped. "The second shooter got through. Armor-piercing round through the wall." He looked at the floor. "I should have stayed. I walked into exactly the play they wanted."
"You're not the only one who failed to stop it," Smith said. "Agent 17 was in the room and couldn't intercept either. The shot came through a wall." He paused. "If he'd made it to a medical pod in time, it might have been different. He didn't."
That was all he said about it.
Hill stepped forward. "Inspector General. Director Fury was assassinated in the middle of a Washington residential block, in broad daylight, by an asset capable of matching a super soldier. This is a direct attack on this agency and it succeeded." Her voice was flat and controlled. "We find them."
"We will," Smith said. "Start pulling everything from the Rose Manor operation. The metal arm is a specific enough physical identifier that cross-referencing against known programs should narrow it significantly."
Hill nodded. Then, carefully: "Sir — is there any possibility of using the Dragon Balls to bring Director Fury back?"
Smith looked at her without particular expression. "The Dragon Balls are on a recharge cycle. After the Kree invasion the discussion was about reviving those fallen in that battle. Now it's Fury. Who's next — everyone who dies between now and the next tournament?" He shook his head. "The Dragonball isn't a standing safety net. He's a being with his own nature and considerable power, and if we start treating every significant death as a valid claim on the wish mechanism, we're going to have a problem." He glanced at Hill. "To give you a sense of scale: that dragon could take apart this solar system without registering the effort."
Hill absorbed this. "So there's no recourse."
"There's the next tournament. If someone wins it and chooses to use the wish that way, that's their decision." He moved toward the door. "In the meantime — find out who did this."
Yelena had put the last round through the wall per Smith's arrangement. Nick Fury had known too much about too many things and had been moving too close to an investigation that couldn't be allowed to reach completion. Smith had given the instruction and it had been carried out cleanly. The question of resurrection was therefore not a question Smith was going to entertain seriously.
He didn't examine this internally. It was a decision that had been made, it had been executed, and the consequences were already in motion.
Natasha found him before he reached the door.
"The Rose Manor super soldier connection — I'm going to start pulling the file tonight."
"Good." He looked at her. "How are you feeling? After the serum."
She considered the question honestly. "I thought I'd bulk up. Every time I saw what the serum did to Rogers — I figured that was the standard outcome." She glanced at her hands. "Nothing changed visibly. But I can feel the difference when I move. The baseline shifted." She almost smiled. "I'm satisfied."
"You adapted it to your existing conditioning rather than rebuilding from scratch. Your frame was already optimized — the serum upgraded the engine without changing the chassis." He nodded. "Check on Rogers. Fury went to his apartment first, which means something. Steve deserves an explanation, even if we can't give him the full one."
Natasha went into the corridor.
Steve was in the corner of the hallway with his back to the wall, not talking to anyone, not looking at anything in particular.
Natasha stopped beside him.
"Why did he come to your place?"
"I don't know why he chose mine." Steve looked at her. "He was already hurt when he got there. Whatever happened to him before I saw him — I don't know the details. He didn't have time to give them."
Rumlow appeared at the far end of the corridor. "Captain. S.H.I.E.L.D. wants you back at headquarters."
Steve looked at him. "I'll be there."
"Immediately, Captain."
Steve held Rumlow's gaze for a moment, then nodded. "All right."
Rumlow turned and walked back toward the entrance.
Natasha looked at Steve and said, quietly: "You can't lie."
She said it without judgment. He knew it was true. He also knew she was reading the fact that he was holding something back, and that she wasn't going to press it right now.
"Natasha—"
But she had already turned and was walking the other direction.
He watched her go. The walkie-talkie on Rumlow's belt crackled as Rumlow passed the duty desk: Commando team, escort Captain Rogers back to S.H.I.E.L.D. immediately.
Steve heard it. He fell in behind Rumlow and the commando team automatically flanking on both sides, and as they passed the vending machine in the lobby alcove — a maintenance worker with a key box open, restocking the shelves — Steve's hand moved to his jacket pocket and came away without what had been in it. The USB drive was in the machine's internal cavity before anyone within range had reason to look.
He kept walking.
Coulson's team had received a replacement aircraft from Fury's direct allocation — not the Bus, which was gone, but something close enough to operational that they could run a field mission out of it. They were airborne when Hill's notification came through.
Coulson read it off the tablet and looked around the team.
"Director Nick Fury was assassinated in Washington this morning."
The cabin went quiet.
"This is from Commander Hill directly. The attackers are almost certainly the same group we've been tracking — the same super soldier team from Rose Manor. The captain identified a metal-prosthetic asset at the scene." He put the tablet down. "We're heading back to New York."
Everyone acknowledged. The aircraft banked north.
The Trident Building ran on the particular institutional energy of an organization that knew something had changed and was trying to decide what that meant. Steve walked the corridors back to Pierce's floor and found Kate in the hallway outside Pierce's office, finishing a debrief.
Pierce placed a hand briefly on her shoulder. "Whatever the outcome — you did what you could."
Kate looked at her hands. "Thank you, sir." She turned to go and saw Steve. "Captain Rogers."
He nodded. He wasn't going to discuss what he felt about the neighbor he'd spent weeks greeting in the hallway turning out to be an agent assigned to monitor him. There were bigger issues in front of him. He walked toward Pierce.
Pierce extended a hand. "Captain Rogers. Alexander Pierce."
Steve shook it. "Sir. Honor to meet you."
"The honor is mine." Pierce stepped back and opened the office door. "My father served in the 101st Airborne. Come in."
The office was the kind of room that had been arranged to look like a working space rather than a display of authority, which meant it was both. Steve's eyes went to the photographs on the desk. One of them showed a much younger Pierce beside a much younger Nick Fury, both squinting against what looked like equatorial sunlight.
Pierce followed his gaze. "Colombia. About five years after I first met Nick. I was at the State Department." He sat behind the desk. "The Colombian Liberation Army occupied our embassy. My guards got me out, but the rebels took hostages. Twelve people."
Steve waited.
"Nick was running the S.H.I.E.L.D. operation in country. He came to me with a plan — go in through the sewer system, hard extraction. I told him no. We negotiate." Pierce looked at the photograph. "The rebels refused to negotiate. Ordered their people to execute the hostages. Nick disobeyed my direct order, ran the sewer operation without authorization, and got all twelve of them out." A pause. "Including my daughter."
"So you promoted him."
"I have never regretted it." Pierce looked at Steve directly. "Captain, why was Nick Fury at your apartment last night?"
"I don't know. He showed up. He was already injured."
"Did you know the apartment was monitored?"
"He told me."
Pierce leaned back slightly. "Did he tell you that he was the one monitoring it?"
Steve looked at him without answering.
Pierce let the silence stand for a moment and then reached forward to activate the display panel on the side of his desk. A video feed came up — interrogation room, professional setup, a figure in the chair that Steve recognized immediately.
Bartók.
"Is this live?"
"They caught him last night in a safe house in Algiers," Pierce said. "Which, it turns out, wasn't very safe." He watched Steve's face. "He's a suspect in the Lemurian Star operation, not in Fury's death. Bartók didn't work assassinations. But what he was hired to do tells us something."
Pierce paused the feed.
"Bartók was engaged by an anonymous client. Communication via email, payment by wire through seventeen relay accounts, final transfer to a holding company registered to a man named Viktor." He slid a folder across the desk. "Viktor died six years ago. His last listed address was 14-35 Elmhurst Street."
Steve opened the folder.
"When I first met Nick," Pierce continued, "I learned that his mother's address was 14-37 Elmhurst Street."
Steve looked up.
"The prevailing theory," Pierce said, "is that the Lemurian Star operation was a cover for a classified transaction. The deal went wrong. Nick was the one who arranged it, and the people he arranged it with arranged his death instead."
Steve kept his face where it was. "If you knew Nick Fury, you know that's not what happened."
"I do know Nick Fury. Which is why I'm here and not accepting that version." Pierce stood and moved toward the French windows. "I work on the Security Council because Nick asked me to. Not because I wanted to sit in rooms and explain geopolitics to people who've decided what they already think." He looked at the city below. "Nick and I understood the same thing: that building a better world sometimes requires dismantling the old one. That you make enemies doing that. That those enemies will call you everything they can think of because you were willing to do the things they weren't." He turned. "That's a cost I've always been willing to pay."
He walked back toward his desk.
"Captain, you were the last person Nick saw before he died. That is not a coincidence." He stopped in front of Steve. "I think you know something. I'm asking you again: why was he at your apartment?"
Steve thought about the USB drive in the vending machine. He thought about what Fury had put in his hand on the floor with a hole in his chest. He thought about the three words Fury had used as his last sentence on earth.
He said: "He told me not to trust anyone."
Pierce looked at him. "Including him?"
Steve thought about Smith Doyle. He thought about the fact that Fury had specifically named one person worth trusting, and that the person standing in front of him was not that person.
"I'm sorry," Steve said. "That was the last thing he said."
He picked up his shield from beside the desk and turned toward the door.
"Captain."
He stopped.
Pierce said: "Someone murdered my friend. I intend to find out who and why. Anyone who stands in the way of that will regret it." He held Steve's gaze. "Whoever they are."
Steve looked at him for a moment.
"Understood," he said.
He walked out of Pierce's office and into the elevator. The doors closed. The car began to descend.
Steve stared at the floor numbers and thought about a dead man's last instruction.