She took the bus into the city on a Saturday afternoon. She sat in the middle of the bus, in a window seat, and stared out onto the traffic as they crossed the Hudson River from Union City.
"Meeting someone?" asked the man sitting next to her.
She jerked her head away from the window. "What?"
"I was wondering why you're going into the city on a Saturday afternoon, that's all," he responded, a warm smile not quite hiding his hard eyes.
"Well, why are you?" she asked, smiling back.
He stretched his legs. "I'm meeting a business partner. He...he was having problems with shipping our goods out."
"Really? What do you sell?"
"Oh, this and that. Mostly replica antiques." He smiled a secret smile. "There are a lot of customers who like to look like art collectors without spending the money. Not the best job, pandering to them, but it's a job."
Now she was actually interested. "What kind of antiques?"
"Mostly Egyptian. Some Greek, too."
"Any Chinese?" It was her habit, seeing how much people knew of Chinese history.
"Interested in your heritage?" The man smiled again, but this time his lips tightened quickly. "We have someone – a very good metalsmith – who we contract out to for Asian replicas."
"And what do you make?"
"Coins, small pots, figurines. The usual stuff."
She nodded, smiled once more and turned back to the window.
He knocked her elbow. "You still haven't told me why you're in the city."
"Just visiting," she said calmly, still looking out the window.
"No real plans?" He just can't shut up, she thought. "Saturday night's a bit late to get started on sightseeing, don't you think? You'd have been better off coming last night, stay the whole week end."
"I was busy last night." She frowned and clenched her fist. Friday night had not been a good night. The man noticed her frown and replied,
"Well, I'll stop bothering you."
Ten or so minutes later, the bus came to its first stop, and she rose. "Are you sure you want to get off here?" the man asked, and frowned at the outside buildings. "It's not the safest place."
"I'll be fine," she replied, stepped around him, and got off the bus.
It took two minutes to see her tail. Two men, oversized hoodies and bulges in their pants where she assumed they kept their guns. Not a very inconspicuous disguise. The clouds rumbled, and it quickly began to rain. She quickened her pace – and so did the men – till she reached an apartment building.
She fumbled for keys on the steps, but before she found the right one the men grabbed her from behind. "You can go softly or you can – well, it'll get ugly if you don't."
She smirked, but they couldn't tell. "Well, when you put it that way."
She was late for her job.
"You're late," David told her at the entrance. She glared back at him.
"I had no idea, David. Thank you for telling me that." She opened the door and left David outside, grumbling about how the boss always let her slide.
"Jo!" said the man at the desk, and handed her a folder and a bag. " 'Bout time you got here, the boss man is getting worried."
"Ran into some trouble, Ian, that's all. Nothing I couldn't handle." He buzzed her into the hallway with the elevators; she took the stairs. It was only one story up.
She entered by the emergency exit to the garage; all it took was one cut wire and the alarms – and the lock – were disabled. She walked past the neatly–parked convertibles and restored antique racecars and into the workroom. Stark designed all his basements the same.
Once the first light sensor lit up, she found the old computer still connected to the building's system and stuck a small USB into it. The speakers in the room crackled for a few seconds, then went silent. She smirked.
"You may have a human voice, Jarvis, but you're still a computer."
She left the garage the same way she had entered and crossed the street. She circled back to the main entrance after walking a couple blocks, but stopped at the little café across the street where people came to watch Iron Man fly to and from his tower.
She ordered a large hot chocolate, sat down at an outside table and took out of her backpack her book: The Ultra Secret, by the old British code breaker named Winterbotham.
"It's nice to see a young person reading," said an old man sitting nearby. He drank from his cup and added, when she looked up, "Too many people these days are glued to computer screens, phone screens." He scoffed, and smiled ruefully at her. "I'm glad some people prefer good old paper pages and stories to fancy technology."
She smiled back and replied, "Thank you." And she returned to her book.