5:30pm. 1st of December, 2005. The Kremlin.
Aleksandr Novichkov was a rather portly middle-aged man, aged forty nine, who just so happened to be one of the most powerful men in Russia. His grandfather had been fortunate enough to own land that had a significant amount of oil located on it, land that Aleksandr and his father had carefully developed until they had become oil magnates in their own right. In the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain, their hold on the Russian oilfields had only tightened, to the point of near complete monopoly until the day Aleksandr (his father having passed away) had been invited to try his luck in the corridors of power. The fact that the price of crude oil dropped by over fifty percent overnight had nothing to do with this offer.
Novichkov had ascended over the years to become the Russian Minister of Finance, applying the skills he had learnt at his father's knee, honed over two decades of overseeing his family's business empire, to making Russia an economic power once more. It had taken him nearly a decade to do it, but Russia had been dragged, kicking and screaming from the disorganised economic rabble left to him by his predecessors into one that could proudly call itself one of the largest in the modern world. He had risen through the ranks of the United Russia party, and was one of the lieutenants in the President's confidence. He glanced impatiently at the antique grandfather clock, resplendently displayed beside the ornate wooden door. It was precisely six o'clock. He was done for today, he decided.
With a pudgy finger, he stabbed the intercom. 'Have my car ready for me in fifteen minutes' he said to his assistant, releasing the button before she could reply. He stood up and stretched, moaning softly as the kinks in his back made themselves known with a vengeance – an unfortunate consequence of having a desk job as involved as his was. Particularly given his position of trust with the current President. It was whispered that he would be a shoe-in for the Presidency once the current leader was gone. After the President and the Prime Minister, he was perhaps the third or fourth most powerful man in Russia.
After a perfunctory check to see if there were any more documents he needed to, he closed the door to his office and began striding to the car park, his guard detail falling in around him.
As the armoured car began to move away, no one noticed a shadow peeling away from a concrete pillar, hand holding a phone to their head.
'He's on his way.'
6:12pm. 1st of December, 2005. Moscow's slums.
To his colleagues and the rest of the Russian populace, Aleksandr Novichkov was an upstanding citizen – a reputation he had carefully cultivated over his political career. He served as the conscience, the counterpoint to many of his colleagues' ruthlessness and corruption. Quite simply, a true born Russian patriot. That was the public face he presented to the world. But every man had a dark side…
The car pulled up outside a small, non-descript house. 'That will be all' he said to his guard detail as he stepped out. 'Stay here. See to it that I am not disturbed.'
He hurried inside; it wouldn't do for any of his political rivals to catch a whiff of what he was doing at this particular house. Indispensable he might be, but even he could be replaced with time, so he could hardly allow himself to be caught visiting a brothel, not could he? Novichkov was greeted with a tastefully understated décor as he strode in. Another time, he might have taken a few moments to admire it, but after a long day like this one, he wanted nothing more than to relax and unwind. And so he moved straight towards the rather provocatively dressed matron who, despite being fifty years of age, looked at least ten years younger. 'The usual, Mr Novichkov?' she asked him calmly.
'I feel like changing it up a little today, madam' he smiled lecherously, a smile that only widened as she walked away into a side corridor, shamelessly admiring the sway of her hips. A few minutes later, and all the prostitutes were being paraded past him. Aleksandr had rather…'special' tastes when it came to sexual partners. He very much liked children. So, as he looked over the sex workers, one in particular caught his eye: a tiny young girl, about eleven or twelve years old, he judged, in a sheer white nightgown that had him salivating. Fiery red hair was kept tame by a simple hairpin that had it in a neat bob. A strong, yet somehow infinitely delicate facial structure – like fine china, he thought – leapt out at him, tempered with somewhat fearful, yet nevertheless composed bright emerald eyes.
'This one.' He said, pointing to her. 'A virgin?'
The matron nodded.
'I see, charge it to my card' he said dismissively, taking the child's hand and tugging her gently into a private room, where they could remain undisturbed for the rest of the night.
If nothing else, Aleksandr Novichkov was an extraordinarily competent Minister for Finance. But his budgets had suggested cutting off funding to the Red Room, and so he had to die. As the young girl followed him, she ran her mind back through the plan. Novichkov was deathly allergic to bees, she knew from reading her files. Her hairpin was hollow, filled with two millilitres of pure distilled apitoxin. More than enough to kill the man. Now she just had to kill him without ever leaving a distinguishable mark…that and preferably without him defiling her, she already felt uneasy with the way he was mentally undressing her. She studied him out of the corner of her eyes, resolutely forcing away the distaste and the urge to snap the hand that was slowly descending down her back.
Tired, weary, long day at work…I could offer to help him relax somehow to buy some time…that would be preferable…but how to do so?
She let none of her rumination on her face, of course; she was far too well trained to ever let something so vital slip. Instead, she plastered a look of fear onto her face – that was probably what a normal girl would be feeling, she guessed – as Novichkov closed the door with a resounding click.
Novichkov spied a bottle of wine resting on a nearby table and sighed in content. 'Get on the bed' he told the girl and made to pour himself a glass of wine. He sat down on the bed, draining his glass in a single gulp. As he shrugged off his outer clothing, the young girl silently approached him and began massaging his stiff shoulders and back.
'Oh' he sighed, unconsciously leaning towards her at the sudden, blissful cessation of pain. He glanced at his feet, cramped from the sheer, bone deep cold that seemed to fill every bit of Moscow in winter. He left out a soft moan as she stopped for a moment, before moving down to his feet. He gulped down another glass of wine and moved a little, so that he was now leaning back against the headboard. He half-closed eyes, relishing the odd mix of pleasure and pain as she expertly worked his feet. Aleksandr tensed slightly as her fingers dug into a particularly stubborn knot, before bonelessly collapsing as it loosened. Already a little tipsy and lost in the dubious pleasure of having a girl who was young enough to be his daughter have her hands all over him, Novichkov never felt the sudden, momentary tiny pinprick under his left big toe.
The female kept massaging him for a minute, until his eyes closed shut completely. The moment they were, she slipped over to the bottle of wine, hefting her hairpin-cum-syringe, and squirted out the last of the apitaxin inside, before doing up her hair again. All this took a matter of seconds.
She didn't spare the man a glance even as a light froth foamed at his slowly blueing lips– why would she? It was done. He was dead. The Red Room was safe. In the end, despite his arrogance, his wealth, his power…Aleksandr Novichkov was just one of many who had felt the widow's bite.
Moscow, 1998.
Fire. A woman, dancing amongst the flames, felling men left and right as they fired at her. A spray of blood filled the air as she shoved a man right into a hailstorm of bullets. A knife flew out of nowhere, buried itself deep within her chest.
The woman gasped for air, even as her lungs filled, that precious, nourishing fluid choking her to an unsightly end. And in the flames, a young howl of loss and pain filled the air. The howl of a child that had just lost their mother, her life taken right in front of her.
The faceless men jabbered back and forth amongst themselves as they grabbed and hauled her out of the fire.
'The asset is secured' one of them said. 'I still don't see what's so important about this one. Why couldn't we just have grabbed a girl from an orphanage like the others?'
'You're not paid to think. You're paid to do as I say. Trust me. This one…this one is special.'
'Not sure how a five year old can be anything special.'
'I repeat, you're not paid to think. Now let's get out of the cold.'
7:48pm. 28th December, 2005. A warehouse on the docks of Vladivostok.
It was almost too easy. The young girl – thirteen, now – crouched, navigating the warehouse silently with nary a sound. She ran the numbers through her head. Ten guards, all split up into two and three man teams. A few cameras, high in the rafters and dotting the walls. Her mark was inside the warehouse office, awaiting the US agents retrieving him. With the cover of the night, long shadows yawned across the room, the only light coming from pale, flickering torches, dancing around as their owners moved back and forth. As the Americans said, she thought, 'easy peasy'. She remained, secure in the shadows, emerald eyes staring unblinkingly at the patrol team she was surveilling.
Her masters had miscalculated. For all his faults, Novichkov was a shrewd man – shrewd enough to have a dead man's switch. Though, apparently, not shrewd enough to keep evidence of such a switch off the papers kept in his safe. One man, carrying documents that implicated the existence of the Red Room to be taken straight to SHIELD. At least, that was the idea. In the process of examining his papers, the girl and her superiors had deduced the one man he would trust with knowledge of such documents. From there it was a simple matter of asking the right questions, the right amount of encouragement and assurances, and they had tracked down the man here to Vladivostok. Intelligence indicated that his SHIELD associates were readying him for an extraction, so it was the girl's job now to ensure the one loose end in their operation was taken care of.
'I'm going to the toilet. Need to take a dump' one of the guards announced. His partner grunted and flapped his hand grouchily in reply, rubbing his hands together. Even bundled down with a thick heavy coat and three layers of clothing – at least, she could only see two and could make out the faint outline of a third – the biting cold was probably enough to stop a mammoth in its tracks, let alone a human. She waited until the first man was out of sight before making her move; still in her crouch, she moved behind them, until she was bare inches away. Close enough to breathe onto them. Had she been a lesser person, her eyebrow would have twitched. She had forgotten to take into account how tiny she was compared to them by dint of age – they were far too tall for her to comfortably slash their neck. No matter.
She jumped; smoothly, her left hand clamped firmly over their mouth. Her legs snapped around their neck in a depraved mockery of a vice. She twisted with all the strength in her tiny body, and was rewarded with dull crack – soft enough that with the wind howling outside, she doubted anyone would hear it. As the guard's body fell like a stone, she leaned to the side and braced its weight as well as her own with both hands. Her arms quivered with the effort of holding them both, shakily sliding across the cold, icy floor. But their job was done – the body's descent was practically silent. One down. Quick as thought, she moved to the toilet corridor. The moment the door opened, the man was greeted with a knife through his skull, driven right through his eye socket as the girl dropped from above. He died quickly.
The girl scowled, glancing around the warehouse. Those two were the easy ones – the other eight or so guards all were in eyesight of each other. There was no way she'd be able to pick them one by one without being noticed. She glanced around and smiled coldly. Perhaps she didn't have to.
'Remind me again as to why exactly we're guarding this piece of shit again' Jasper Sitwell asked his commanding officer, John Garrett, Agent of SHIELD, level seven.
'Because, Sitwell, he has information pertaining to a known network of assassins that has confounded SHIELD since World War Two' Garrett ground out. He checked the time. One hour till they could wash the defecting Russian off their hands. He frowned. 'Hey, is it just me, or -'
Before Garrett could finish his sentence, a shipping container smashed right into him and his partner.
She smiled thinly. Just as predicted. She tapped a button on the inside of her forearm; moments later, another volley of crates and shipping containers flew out at the agents milling around their crushed superiors, propelled by the force of several tiny grenades. She moved quickly; in the chaos, none of the agents milling below even noticed a slim, almost invisible figure rising up to the rafters, suspended by nothing but a slim cord. She took a mental stock take of her arsenal. Two knives. Sleeping gas pellets. Smoke pellets. Garrotte wire. Some prototype taser discs. A pistol.
The young assassin worked quickly; she managed to squeeze off four shots before they could react. Every one of them struck her targets in the head. Without a moment's hesitation, she threw herself off the beam, hurtling downwards, right towards the gap between two piles of crates with all the grace and poise of an experienced ballerina. Mere moments before she cracked her head on the cold hard ground, her hands shot out towards the crates and caught their edges, directing all of her momentum forward and up. Her feet met another agent's face, knocking them out cold. As she dropped to the floor her fingers curled around her knife and flicked out at their throat; a spray of blood filled the air.
Eight down. Two more to go. She glanced up, just in time to see the door to the office slam shut. And then the world stilled around her, a gloved hand clamped over her mouth, a forearm began crushing her throat, and black spots were starting to fill her vision. She didn't panic, though; she had experienced situations like this far too many times to even blanch. Calmly – as much as she could with someone trying to choke her into unconsciousness, anyway – she flipped the knife in her hand and stabbed backwards, driving it deep into her captor's thigh. Their grip slackened slightly, enough that with a sudden twist, she broke away from them just enough that another stab found her knife buried deep within their stomach. Then their throat.
One left, excluding the target. She plucked out two taser discs and tossed them underneath the door. Perhaps now was the time to see if they worked. Moments later, a crackling filled the air and the stench of burned flesh wafted to her nostrils. She opened the door and fired two shots.
'Well, what's her name?'
'Does it matter?'
'Saves me the trouble making up a fake one.'
The burly man sighed and turned to the girl. 'What's your name?' he barked out, slapping her out of glazed apathy, still in shock. She blinked slowly. As the man raised his hand again, the child – barely six years old – flinched, scrabbling backwards and said shakily, 'N-Natalia Ali-Alianov-novna R-Romanova.'
'Natalia Alianovna Romanova' the scientist said clinically, writing it down. He smiled at her callously. 'Beautiful name. You won't be needing it for the time being, though. Strap her down and intubate her' he commanded.
As the girl was forced onto the bare grey slab of cool metal, thrashing uselessly against the bulky man's grip, the scientist sighed, 'Oh, do be quiet. There is no need for chatter from test subjects. As a test subject, you have no rights. Besides, you should be proud to serve your for the greater good as a member of this program'. He turned back to his desk and scribbled something down as he dictated to himself. 'Subject number one, name: Natalia Aliavnovna Romanova. Gas her, we don't need her thrashing around during the experiment. Where was I? Oh yes. Natalia Romanova. Injecting with strain 32-A of enhanced soldier serum.'
A few minutes later had the unconscious girl – still clad in sooty pyjamas – with enough tubes stabbing into her that she might well have passed for an ER patient. A light blue fluid began running through those tiny plastic pipelines, starting the process of forging her body into something more. Into the body of what would one day be hailed world's most feared covert operative. A terrorist. A saviour. A villain. A hero. An Avenger.
That day was the day that the Black Widow was born.
Hi, thanks for reading. Follow, favourite, review, etc. I assure you that it has only begun. Until next time,
Phoenix