The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (10 page)

Fury said, "How exactly do you know about that, Doctor Pym?"

Are you going to step in here, Tony? Hank wondered. How's Nick going to feel about you feeding me tissue samples? "It's important for me to keep up on certain things," Hank said. "For research purposes."

"You will immediately cut out whatever the hell it is you're doing that involves access to classified discussions among the team, Doctor Pym. Do not cross me on this."

"Nick, I'm watching TV right now. The fire department is snooping through my lab, and the police are there too because someone told them they saw me kill somebody. There's a dead Chitauri in the lab freezer, Nick. When they find it, what's going to happen to me? It's long past time when you could feed me any bullshit. Is SKR an accident, and now I've got a spy in my lab? You tell me what the hell is going on!"

"What's going on is that you were working in an area you shouldn't have been working in, and now you've got a problem," Fury said coldly.

"And I have to say you're sounding a little bit paranoid, Hank," Tony added.

"Oh, am I? Okay, I'll put it to you this way. If the police show up at my door with an arrest warrant, I'm going to sing like a canary, and SHIELD can go to hell. If, on the other hand, SHIELD wants to step in and get the cops out of my lab, I might be able to tell you something interesting about the results of the last experiment I got done before a goddamn Chitauri spy made me wreck my lab. If that's paranoid, then I plead guilty."

Silence on the other end of the line.

"You've got a little time to think about it," Hank said. "Call me back." He hung up and watched the report loop back to aerial footage of his lab. The ants worked, he thought. And they'd work a hell of a lot better than whatever sensor SKR TechEnt had come up with. Hank watched the television and worked himself up into a cold fury over how Tony Stark was treating him. He resolved that Tony wouldn't get away with it forever. You couldn't just treat someone like that, especially not Hank Pym. No, sir. When Nick decided to cover his ass and come in to get the Chitauri out of the lab, Hank would have a chance to talk to him without Tony around, and General Nicholas Fury was going to get an earful. That was for sure.

15

The call from General Fury came while Steve was in the middle of a cheeseburger and a TCM showing
of The Thin Man
. "Need you at the Triskelion pronto, Cap," Fury said. So Steve got there pronto, and found his way to a helipad where General Fury was waiting for him with Tony Stark and, of all people, Thor.

"What's he doing here?" Steve said, pointing at the self-professed god of thunder.

"You'll find out when we get there," General Fury said.

"Get where?"

"Illinois," Tony said with a wink. "Try not to start any fights this time, okay?" Two hours later they were standing inside a police cordon that extended in a hundred-yard radius from a partially collapsed single-story building in a business park in Wilmette, Illinois. Hazmat-suited SHIELD

personnel picked through the wreckage, while under the blades of the turbocopter that had brought the SHIELD team, General Fury was making an emphatic point to a local police detective. "I've got reports of a murder taking place here, General," the detective said. "You can say national security this and terrorism that, but what am I supposed to tell people? We're not investigating a murder?"

"You will tell them to talk to me," General Fury said. "If we determine that a murder has been committed, that part of the investigation goes back to you once we get it untangled from some other things that, I promise you, you don't want to know anything about."

Steve could tell from the detective's face that he did in fact want very much to know, but that he knew he never would. "I have your word on this?" he said eventually. "This isn't Chicago. If somebody was killed in there, we've got to know who it is."

Fury handed him a card. "You call me at this number tomorrow morning. By then I'll know what I can tell you and what I can't. Fair enough?"

The detective took the card, but he didn't like the deal. "As fair as I'm going to get, is what I'm hearing."

'You're hearing right, Detective. Now I'm going to ask you a favor."

"Oh, well, we're getting along so well already. Sure. Whatever I can do."

"I know you're going to go right home and find out who was actually the tenant of this building," General Fury said. "So I'm going to save you that trouble. His name is Doctor Henry Pym. I am going to askyou, as a professional courtesy, to not contact Doctor Pym until you hear from me. Can we agree on that?"

"Is he the giant guy?" the detective asked.

"Detective," General Fury said. "You have all kinds of witness reports saying all kinds of different things, I'm sure. If you let me get to what I need to do here, I can save you a lot of work putting them all together."

A silence hung between them, broken after thirty seconds or so when the detective lit a cigarette and said, "Okay. Fine. I'm calling you at eight a.m., General. Hope you keep early hours."

"Eight a.m.," Fury said, rolling his eyes. "I'll be lucky if I get to sleep by then."

"Boo hoo," the detective said, and walked away trailing cigarette smoke. Fury walked back over to where Steve was waiting with Tony and Thor. "Nick," Tony said. "I'm supposed to be at an art opening with Scarlett Johansson. Please explain to me why this is more important."

Steve kept his mouth shut, but he was just about fed up with Tony's posturing. General Fury had briefed them during the flight, as a result of which Steve knew that Tony had taken the call from Hank Pym that had brought them all here. What Steve couldn't figure out was why Thor was along. He couldn't imagine that General Fury had decided to trust an obviously crazy pinko with something as serious as the details of a new Chitauri incursion. Regardless of what Thor had done with the Chitauri bomb in Arizona, Steve didn't for a minute believe in a thunder god. Either the bomb hadn't done what the Chitauri said it would, or the tech in Thor's hammer had some secret function that he hadn't told any of them about. Whichever it was, Thor was a loose cannon and a security risk. If it was up to Steve, Thor wouldn't have been let within a mile of the Triskelion.

But that wasn't his call. It was General Fury's.

That thought led Steve in an uncomfortable direction, recalling the Chitauri at Andrews and the phone call he'd made after dinner at Peter Luger's. From any angle, Steve knew, he was going off the reservation. Good soldiers didn't do that.

Or did they? It had been a long time since he'd been just a soldier. When he'd ridden a Nazi rocket into the troposphere, he'd earned the right to think for himself. General Fury still wanted him to be the super-soldier chess piece, moved here and there without question, but General Fury—there Steve was going off the reservation again—too often had to make decisions polluted by political considerations. Maybe it was up to the soldiers to simply do what was right.

General Fury didn't answer Tony in any case. He turned to an approaching member of the response team and said, "What have you got?"

Pulling off her suit's hood, the tech said, "Well, he was right about the Chitauri in the freezer. We're pulling the whole appliance as soon as we get it sealed. Looks like Pym squished it pretty good, but you can never tell. I've got guys in there sterilizing the blood on the floors. Also he mentioned a test sample, right? That we haven't found."

Looking away from her to Tony, General Fury said, "You have any idea about that?"
Aha
, Steve thought. That's why he's here.

"None," Tony said. "Is that what you brought me nine hundred miles to ask? If it is, then I've got a jet warmed up and waiting over at Palwaukee."

"Not until I get an answer. Did you give Chitauri tissue to Mank Pym?"

"Nick, how much do you really want to know about how I spend black-budget money?" General Fury walked over to Tony and stood a little too close to him. "I want to know," he said quietly,

"whether you hired Flank Pym or diverted resources, including Chitauri tissue, to him. That's what I want to know."

"Okay," Tony said. "Yes, I did. He really has done some interesting work. Hard to tell from this," he waved a hand at the wreckage of Pym's lab, "whether any of it worked, but if you want my opinion, SHIELD'S shooting itself in the foot by turning him into a pariah. I mean, my God, the things some of us have done and you cut him loose for spousal abuse?"

"Cut it out," Steve said.

Tony flipped a hand in Steve's direction without looking at him. "Okay, Romeo. I know you and Janet have a thing going now," he said before continuing his spiel to General Fury. "We've all got our hands dirty, Nick. I happen to think Hank Pym is a coward and I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire; but if he can help us, that's more important." Then he looked over his shoulder at Steve and said, "Of course you'd never do anything that wasn't perfectly aboveboard. That's why all of us regular people who compromise their morals seem so filthy to you."

"I told you the other day," Steve said. "Next time you and I go at it, I'm not holding back."

"Then do it," Tony said.

"Stand down, Captain," General Fury said. "Last thing in the world I need is TV cameras catching the two of you in a fight. Tony, get the hell out of here. Cap, you and Thor meet me back in the copter." He walked away toward the lab, where the techs were clearing some of the rubble to make way for the sealed freezer. Halfway there he stopped, turned around, and called, "Tony. I meant it. Out. Now." Tony winked at Steve and said, "
Au revoir, mon ami
. Next time let's fight some bad guys, how does that sound?"

Steve didn't answer. He watched Tony walk to the cordon and duck under it. A car pulled up out of nowhere, and the door was open before Tony could reach for the handle. A guy like that, Steve thought, everything done for him, everyone bends over backward for him, and what is he? An amoral boozehound with a brain tumor. That's not the kind of person we need running things around here.

"So that's why Nick brought Tony," Thor said. Steve had forgotten he was there. "What do you think the two of us are doing here?"

Steve shrugged. "I'm following orders. You, who knows?"

"Not me," Thor said. "Although it's crossed my mind that the general thinks the two of us might correct each other's worst tendencies."

"Give me a break," Steve said, and started to walk away.

"Steve," Thor said, and for some reason Steve stopped. He waited for Thor to go on and deliver whatever loony speech he'd cooked up this time.

But Thor surprised him. "Steve, you need to stop thinking all the time that you're different from the rest of us."

Steve turned around. "I'm different from you, that's for sure."

"Fair enough," Thor said. "If that's the distinction that makes you feel better, go with it. But I'm going to ive you some advice. When someone wants something from you, ask yourself why they want it, and who wanted them to ask you."

"Okay, Ann Landers," Steve said.

Thor chuckled. "Funny. Anyway, that's Loki's advice, not mine. He asked me to pass it along."

"Oh, for Pete's sake," Steve said, and walked over to the lab building's doorway. On the way, he spotted a chalk circle with a spatter of Chitauri blood in it. The team hadn't yet gotten around to sterilizing it. We're chasing them, Steve thought. Always a step behind.

He went inside. "Watch out for the ants, sir," a suited tech said. "Some of them bite like hell."

"Thanks," Steve said. The inside of the lab, although partially cleared out, was a complete wreck. He could see from the shape of the bent beams where Hank had gone through the roof, and how on his way through he'd snapped the main support beam, causing most of the rest of the roof to come down. The collapse had crushed most of the ant farms, and the response team was getting ready to fire offa series of insecticide bombs because nobody knew for sure whether Pym had created some kind of mutant ant that might get out and wreck the local ecosystem.

Fury was observing the removal of the freezer. He saw Steve picking his way through the wreckage and said, "What brings you in here, Captain?"

"Well, General," Steve said, and finally let go of th question he'd been asking himself all night. "I've got another version of the same question for you. Why did you bring Thor and me?" General Fury looked surprised. "You serious, Captain? Muscle. We didn't know what was out here. Didn't know whether we might have to take Pym down, for that matter. Turned out we didn't need you, but better safe than sorry." He winked his good eye. "Sun Tzu says that somewhere, right?" The next morning, which made it the third day after he'd made the call from the pay phone on Havemeyer Street, Steve was eating breakfast at his kitchen table when he heard a knock at the door. Probably the kids down the hall selling candy bars again, he thought, fishing in his pockets. He still couldn't believe that anyone could keep a straight face while asking two dollars for a candy bar, but that was the world now... and what the heck, if any of that money really did go to whatever cause they said it did, the rip-off would be worth it.

Opening the door, Steve was all ready to give the kid his two bucks and complain about it, but instead of the kid, he found himself looking at Admiral Esteban Garza. "I—oh," Steve said. "Admiral. I was expecting someone else."

"Captain. May we come in?"

Steve stepped aside and let Garza pass. A second man, who had
spook
written all over him, followed. Garza stood in the middle of Steve's living room, not speaking or touching anything while the spook took out some kind of sensor apparatus and scanned every surface. It took ten minutes or so, at the end of which he said, "Looks clear, Admiral."

"Okay, Larry. Fire me up a baffler and then Captain Rogers and I will have a talk." Larry pocketed his first apparatus, came up with another one, and put it on the coffee table between Steve's couch and the TV He flipped a little toggle switch on its face, and it began emitting a low hum.

"All set?" Garza asked.

"Yes, sir."