The two men ate lunch – soup and sandwiches at a cafe on South Hyde Park Avenue – and then split up again. Sam took the car, and went to the International Ship Repair and Marine Services dock in Ybor Channel, while Steve set out on foot looking for something that wasn't easy to find in this era of digital communications: a public telephone. He could have used his cell, but Natasha preferred that he not. Cell phones were too personal, too easy to connect to their specific users. Pay phones were available to anybody, and therefore safely anonymous. Steve found one in the university post office, and pushed a quarter into the slot.

It picked up on the eighth ring. Natasha liked to be sure people really wanted to talk to her. "Hello?" a woman's voice asked in a Louisiana drawl.

"Natasha?" asked Steve. "It's me."

"Why, Stephen!" the voice said, as if in exasperation. "What have I told y'all about callin' me at work?" Steve could hear the sound of children giggling in the background. After the fall of SHIELD, Natasha had gotten a job at a dance school in Baton Rouge. She seemed to like it there, but the presence of her students meant that conversations in Steve had to be in code. At least she seemed to have gotten bored with pretending she was talking to her grandfather. "If you're wonderin' about Jimmy, I ain't seen him in forever." This was her way of telling him she hadn't learned anything new about Bucky.

"I'm not calling about Bucky," said Steve. "Sam and I are in Tampa. I don't know if this made the news anywhere else, but they found a body in the water, and the guy who identified it told me that I have a bunch of clones and somebody's killing them off one by one." No wonder Sam had thought the whole thing might just be Strong's delusion. When he summed it up like, that, it did sound a little ridiculous. Just a little.

"Now, who would go and tell y'all a silly thing like that?" Natasha huffed. It was an effort for Steve not to laugh – he could just see her standing there with her phone to her ear and a hand on her hip, presenting students and colleagues with the very image of an affronted girlfriend. The fact that she'd worked the question into her performance, however, meant that she wanted an answer to it.

"A cab driver from Orlando," Steve said. "According to his license, his name is Tobias Anthony Strong."

"Oh, well, of course he would!" Natasha said. "Tell you what, baby. I'll have a word with him after my lesson and we'll get him sorted out. Right now I've gotta run – these little dolls are gonna dance their sweet toes off for Miss Romero, aren't y'all?" There was more background giggling.

Steve rubbed his forehead, trying to figure out exactly what she was telling him. Was of course he would a way of implying that she knew who Strong was, or just a way to segue into her promise to look into it? When she said she would have a word with him and get him sorted out, did she mean exactly that? Strong had already been afraid for his life. If the Black Widow showed up at his door unannounced, he might have a heart attack. The last part was clear enough, though – she was surrounded by her students, and couldn't be more specific about anything right now.

"Thanks," he said. "I'll go catch up with Sam and wait to hear from you, okay?"

"It's a date," Natasha promised. "Love you, baby."

That left Steve an opening he couldn't resist. "I love you, too, Tasha," he replied, with only a bit of a snicker.

She laughed. "Mwah!" she said, and ended the call.

Despite everything, Steve was smiling as he hung up. Natasha got deep and passionately into character during these conversations and he knew he did it on purpose, trying to make him laugh at inappropriate moments. Someday she would succeed, and Steve would crack up helplessly in public while everybody around him stared, not understanding what was so funny. He'd kept his cool today – but at least he was in a good mood as he caught another bus to Ybor Channel.

It didn't last, of course. He arrived to find more bad news.

The shipyard appeared to be a crime scene. The cops had cordoned off an area around a large shipping container with faded Roxxon logo on the side, and people in white plastic forensics suits – those must have been horrible to wear in the Florida sunshine – were manhandling a body into the back of an ambulance. Steve's stomach twisted itself into a knot. He didn't seem Sam anywhere, but he was sure his partner had to be nearby – Steve could find him later. Right now, he had to get nearer. He had to find someplace from which he could see the face of the corpse.

There was an overpass where the Selmon Expressway crossed North 17th Street. By getting up on top of that, Steve could get a view of the whole channel, with the warehouses and offices of the ship repair firm. It still wasn't a very close look, but he could see uniformed police officers interviewing employees, while detectives scrutinized the shipping container the body had been found of. Steve pulled out a set of digital binoculars Natasha had given him a few months earlier. These were no bigger than the ones people bought for casual birdwatching, but they had an adjustable zoom that a normal camera would have needed a lens a foot long to accomplish. Even through those, though, Steve couldn't see the dead man's face. He could make out ash-brown hair and a bit of scruffy beard, and a blue and white shirt with the letters STRA visible, but nothing more.

Please, no. Steve didn't think he could stand finding his own corpse twice in twenty-four hours.

Footsteps alerted him to the approach of another person, but when he looked up he found it was only Sam. The other man came and leaned on the railing next to him.

"Found our source," he said.

"Really?" Steve's hopes rose, then fell like a stone as he realized exactly what Sam was referring to. "Oh," he said. "No wonder he didn't text." The EMTs shut the ambulance door on the corpse. Steve sighed and put the binoculars back in his backpack. "You sure that's him?" he asked. The only things they knew about RedWolff06 was his username and that he'd said they would recognize him at the Pier by his hockey jersey. They didn't have a photo. How could Sam be certain the dead body was his?

"His co-workers told me his name was Rudy Finster," Sam replied. "Big hockey fan. Anton Stralman, Tampa Bay Lightning number six."

Rudy was short for Rudolph. Red Wolf, in a jersey with the number 06 on it. That did seem to settle it.

"They found him dead in a refrigerated container, around eight AM this morning," Sam added. "They've got no idea how long he's been there. Whoever did it turned the temperature down as far as it would go. He's frozen solid."

It had been four days since they'd last communicated with Finster online. "How long has the ship been in drydock?" Maybe the reason it needed painting had something to do with Finster's death.

"I think I heard forty-eight hours," said Sam.

"I hope he was already dead when they locked the door," Steve said grimly. "Freezing is a terrible way to go. Did you get a look at him at all?"

Sam shook his head. "Sorry."

Steve wanted to punch something, but the only thing available was the concrete side of the overpass, and punching that would damage either it or his fist – possibly both. "I guess there's no sign of that weapons shipment, either?"

"Not a single goddamn bullet. If the ship's being repaired then they probably had to find another way to transport them, anyway."

Steve nodded dismally. Dead ends. Dead ends everywhere, many of them depressingly literal. It was enough to drive a man crazy, or make him doubt whether he'd ever been sane to begin with. Maybe that was HYDRA's whole plan at this point.

"Did you get in touch with Natasha about your clone thing?" asked Sam.

"Yeah," Steve said. "She nearly Southern Belled me to death, but she said she'd look into it." He watched as the police loaded the refrigerated crate onto the back of a flatbed semi truck. "Remember when I thought we were gonna track down Bucky inside of a month and find the remaining HYDRA holdouts with his help?"

"Yeah," said Sam. "Why?"

"Did you ever actually believe we'd be able to do that?" Steve wanted to know.

"Couldn't say." Sam shrugged. "When Captain America shows up on your doorstep and asks you to help him prevent a secret society from overthrowing the government, and then you actually do exactly that, there's a while there when anything seems possible."

"What about after a nine-month road trip full of false leads and still no sign of Bucky?"

Sam hesitated. "The novelty kinda wears off," he admitted. "Why? Are you thinking about packing it in?" His face was worried – he didn't want Steve to give up.

"No," said Steve, without any hesitation at all. "Don't worry." Of course he wasn't going to quit – he couldn't. If he quit doing this, he wouldn't have anything. Steve needed a purpose in his life. He always had. If nobody gave him one, he would come up with one for himself. If he couldn't even do that, he would just wander around picking fights with anybody who acted like a jerk in public, the way he'd used to before Erskine found him.

The cops lashed the container to the bed of the truck and then covered it with a giant white plastic sheet. Convenient of the killer, Steve thought, giving them a crime scene they could just pick up and carry away to study. Especially a refrigerated one, which would preserve the evidence for them. So convenient, in fact, that he doubted they'd find so much as a drop of blood inside – HYDRA was more careful than that. And if Finster really were RedWolff06, then it seemed he hadn't been a crank or a false tip at all. He'd had real information, and now Steve and Sam would never know what it was.

Steve frowned. "A refrigerated container," he said out loud. "What do they ship in those?" There'd been ice-cooled train cars and shipping containers in the 1940's, used to transport meat and dairy. Had they picked up additional uses since?

"Food, mostly," said Sam. "Anything that can spoil." The truck maneuvered slowly out of the lot and onto North 20th Street. "What are you thinking?"

"Bioweapons," said Steve. Howard Stark, with his brilliant mind that somehow couldn't seem to stop devising ways to kill people, had practically invented the field – but his successors had gleefully taken it to ever more awful extremes. Finster had never told them what kind of weapons HYDRA was smuggling, but he'd implied that he did know, and would have told them at the Pier meeting. With him dead, all they had now were his hints. "We need to look at the cargo manifests," Steve said.

"Cops or reporters?" asked Sam. They had posed as both in several states by now, and Steve liked to think they were getting pretty good at it. "Reporters might not be allowed to look," Sam went on thoughtfully. "There'll be lots of cops around. Nobody will notice more cops."

"The cops will," Steve said. "We could be FBI, but there's no reason for them to get involved in this. Finster was murdered where he worked. The county will be handling it."

Sam snapped his fingers. "I got it! Have you got a suit?"

"What, my uniform?" asked Steve, puzzled. What would that do, besides attract attention? "I gave that back to the Smithsonian." The curator had looked as if he would cry when he saw the damage it had sustained.

"No, a normal person suit," said Sam. He mimed pulling at a pair of lapels. "The kind with a jacket and tie. We're gonna be lawyers."

Steve chuckled. "Perfect, except that no, I don't have a suit." When they'd set off on their possibly-suicidal cross-country conspiracy-fighting trip, suits and ties hadn't been on the list of things either had figured they'd need. "We can rent them, though. We'll also need a business card." This was all going to take time that they could have devoted to the clone thing... but if they focused on the clone thing instead, the Albatross problem might slip through their fingers. Could they possibly do both without missing something vital?

Steve's phone buzzed. He pulled it out to check, and found a very brief text message from an unknown number.

08:30 Busch Gardens :)

"What's that?" Sam asked.

"That'll be Natasha," Steve replied. The smiley face was how she 'signed' her messages. "Apparently she's taking us to the amusement park." He showed Sam the phone.

"Well, when the Black Widow tells you to be there, you be there," said Sam.

Busch Gardens didn't open until ten, but by 8:30 the next morning people were already queuing outside the gates while loudspeakers blared corny 'adventure' music into the gathering crowd. Since Natasha's message had not been specific, Sam and Steve just got in line and acted casual. They had faith in her ability to find them.

"Mornin', fellas!" her voice said suddenly, and there she was, right next to them. She'd dyed her hair dark brown and was wearing it long and straight with bangs in front, and here bright floral-print dress was accessorized with an enormous red pleather purse and oversized sunglasses. It ought to have been possible to see her coming from a mile away, and yet somehow neither Steve nor Sam had spotted her until she spoke up. In this crowd of gaudily-dressed tourists, she blended right in.

"I get sick on roller coasters," Steve warned her. "At least, I think I do. I haven't been on one in, oh, about seventy years or so."

"That's okay. We ain't stayin'," Natasha promised, in the same deep south accent she'd used on the phone. Steve was gratified to see that Sam, too, had trouble keeping a straight face confronted with it. "Come on," she added, gesturing for the boys to follow her. "We're goin' for a car ride."

She led them back to a car in the parking lot – Steve decided to assume it was hers – and got into the front, while the men climbed in the back seat.

"Where are we going?" Steve asked.

"Nowhere," said Natasha, the accent vanishing. She started the car, then reached into her purse and pulled out a small metal object, which she dropped into Steve's hand. "Do you know what this is?"

He held it up for a look. "It's a class ring," he said. Why would Natasha give him that?

"Harvard Law," Sam agreed. "With the three books and the ve-ri-tas."

Natasha nodded, and kept her eyes up front as she maneuvered out of the parking lot. "What did Toby Strong look like?"

"Like Stark." Steve didn't even need to think about it – that had been his first impression of the man, and it would be the one that lingered. "If he were twenty years younger and traded the Van Dyke for a pair of big black-rimmed glasses. Did you find out anything about him?"

"He's not a cab driver," said Natasha. "Maybe he is now, but until last May he was a SHIELD optics technician."

"What does that entail?" asked Steve. Optics technician didn't sound particularly threatening, but you never knew with SHIELD. Fury had bragged once that his organization's technology was twenty to fifty years ahead of what was on the public market. Steve had always meant to try and meet some of the people who worked on it and thank them for providing him and the other field agents with their gear. The opportunity had never come up, and was now lost forever.

"Targeting, scanning, cameras, anything with lenses and light," Natasha explained. "That ring is one of his – the camera lens is in the loop of the 'R'. If you still have those binoculars I gave you, he built those, too, to my specifications. Everybody else told me you couldn't make a zoom lens like that. Strong just asked me for a couple of extra days." She was smiling a bit. Clearly, she'd liked the man's can-do attitude.

That confirmed what Steve had suspected based on their phone conversation: "you've met him, then."

"A few times." She nodded. "Always for equipment requests. Actually, when Fury sent me to watch Stark, my first thought was that he looked an awful lot like Strong."

"So did SHIELD make the clones?" Steve asked. "Or just take them in?" He hoped it was the latter, just so he could have some faith in the organization left.

"I don't know. I didn't know they existed." Natasha thought about it for a minute. "Strong said... it was a joke around his department for years," she explained. "When people told him he looked like Stark, he would say that he was a clone and they grew him from a kleenex Stark used after getting a bloody nose in a bar fight. As far as I know, nobody ever took it seriously. I don't know anything about Strong's past, but that's normal enough for SHIELD. They didn't really encourage us to get to know our co-workers." Natasha was quiet a moment longer, then said, "I can tell you he probably grew up in the Four Corners. He tends to shorten his A's. He says Colla-rad-oh instead of Colla-raw-doh."

"So he's been around for a while," said Sam. "He didn't just pop up after the Battle of New York when somebody said, hey, let's clone the Avengers."

"Oh, no," Natasha agreed. "Strong's one of the prodigies. SHIELD would go out of their way to hire child geniuses. He'd been working for them since he was about fifteen. What did he tell you?"

Steve described the conversation, ashamed to admit just how little he'd actually learned from it. He'd missed so many opportunities. Natasha would have come away from the same taxi ride with Strong's entire life story and details on all the other clones he'd mentioned. "He did say, explicitly, that he was a clone," Steve said in closing. "He said more are on the way."

"That's not a threat," said Sam. "That's an Alice Cooper song."

That was slightly reassuring, at least. Steve leaned forward between the seats. "Do you ever remember meeting anybody at SHIELD who looked like me?" he asked Natasha. "Me, but shorter, and probably not breathing too well?" It was funny... he barely remembered now what it had been like to be that sickly little man. There was a dreamlike quality to his memories of the aches and the shortness of breath, of the straining to reach shelves and the straining to hear, that made it all seem like part of somebody else's life. But if half of Steve's life were a dream, wouldn't it make more sense that little Steve in 1944 was the reality, and Captain America in 2015 was the illusion?

Natasha's reply brought him back out of this reflective moment. "No, not that I remember," she said, "but there were a lot of people at SHIELD I never paid any attention to. Clerks, janitors, secretaries... maybe nobody wanted me to pay attention to them."

There was bitterness in her voice, and Steve couldn't blame her. That was part of her job, to vanish into a crowd and be that person nobody looked at, and she was good at it. To know she'd been fooled by people exactly like herself must be hard for her to take – but she wouldn't want sympathy, so Steve said nothing.

"At least it's not hard to imagine why they'd want to clone him," Sam said with a grin. "The boy's worth cloning for his delts alone."

"It didn't work, though," Steve said, ignoring the joke. "The clones didn't show the effects of the serum. That's the part that doesn't make sense. If they're killing them just because they were a failed experiment, why would they be doing that now?" That was such a horrible thought. At least the people targeted by Project Insight were potential threats. The clones were apparently dying just because somebody was disappointed in them. "If they made these clones before I came back, why keep them for years and let them establish identities for themselves? The ones Strong talked about all had names and jobs. Why wait to get rid of them until somebody will actually notice that they're missing?"

"We can't guess at that until we know who was responsible for the project and what happened to it," Natasha told him. "I'll have to look at the wikileaks data and see if there's anything left that the software I have can decrypt. HYDRA's been slipping viruses into it," she added, annoyed. "There are still clean copies around, but you have to be very careful about what you download these days."

Digital guerrilla warfare, Steve thought. What a world he'd awakened on. "Did you actually go talk to Strong?" If Natasha had already known him, her appearance might not have terrified him quite so much.

"I tried," she said. "He was already gone when I found his apartment. He left in a big hurry. All his stuff was still there, including food, clothes, and unopened mail. Everything but whatever he kept on one empty bookshelf," she said thoughtfully.

That wasn't very helpful. Again, Steve wished he'd asked better questions before Strong kicked him out of the car. "Any idea where he went? He wouldn't tell me."

"I've got an idea how to find out," Natasha said, "but first I need to grab a nap. This regular work schedule thing is getting to me." She glanced in the rearview mirror and smiled at the men. "Unless you boys want to try the roller coasters after all."

Steve shook his head. "Maybe another time."

Natasha took her nap in their motel room, and in the afternoon they returned to Ybor Channel. The ship repair company had a gate at the entrance, but when three professionally-dressed people in a new, clean car pulled up, the bar rose and the security guard waved them through without bothering a second look. They parked, and Natasha waited with the car while Sam and Steve headed for the long, low building that housed the company offices.

Both men were dressed in rented suites. Sam's was a pretty good fit, but the buttons on Steve's blazer were slightly strained, and he wasn't about to try raising his arms over his head. They walked into the building, and Sam pulled out a business card – purchased half an hour earlier at a printing shop on East Adamo Drive – and gave it to the receptionist.

"We're from the law firm of Piper and Shea," said Sam.

"He's Piper," said Steve.

"He's Shea," said Sam.

"We're representing Roxxon," Steve said. "We'd like to get a look at any paperwork you have associated with the Albatross and its contents."

"The Finster family is preparing a lawsuit," said Sam.

"Of course." The receptionist, a plump Latina woman in catseye glasses, stood up. "Right this way, Gentlemen."

Steve and Sam shared a conspiratorial smile as they followed her. The fake Harvard ring with its tiny hidden camera was on Sam's left middle finger. So far, everything was going smoothly. Maybe a little too smoothly... but Steve pushed that thought out of his head. It would only jinx them.

About twenty extremely disappointing minutes later, the two men thanked the receptionist, assured her that they didn't want any coffee or to meet her recently divorced daughter, and returned to the car.

Natasha was still waiting. She, too, was dressed in a rented suit, in case Sam and Steve made fools of themselves and she had to intervene, and had been listening in on a small bug she'd stuck to the back of one of Sam's buttons. As they approached, she gave them a round of only slightly ironic applause. "You two did great," she said. "I'm proud of you. I didn't think you had it in you, Mr. Oh Yes, We're Getting Married." She poked Steve in the middle of the chest.

Neither of them felt that they deserved the compliment. Steve just scowled and shook his head, while Sam pulled the ring off and handed it back to her. "Here," he said. "Take a look."

She opened it and slid the micro SD connector into her phone. The photographs Sam had taken popped up, and Steve watched Natasha's fingers slide across the screen to choose one image and zoom in – the manifest describing what the Albatross' intended cargo had been, before an accident had left it in the channel for repainting. He knew exactly when she saw the relevant word. Natasha wasn't bothering to hide her emotions right now, and the disappointment registered in both her face and her posture.

"Perishables?" she asked.

"Perishables," Steve confirmed – the only word listed as the contents of the refrigerated containers. He was growing increasingly tempted to take out his frustration on something, and the idea of throwing his prop briefcase over the drydocks and into the water beyond was a very appealing one.

"Entirely legal, but extremely suspicious," Natasha said. She flicked to the next page, and cocked her head. "Colorado Springs?"

"That's where the cargo was coming from," Sam nodded. "Too bad nobody knows where it ended up – except for Finster, and he's not talking."

Natasha pursed her lips as she considered that. "There was a SHIELD research facility outside of Colorado Springs, underneath the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. Strong's first job was there. Colla-rad-oh." She mimicked his idiosyncratic pronunciation again.

"What kind of research?" asked Steve.

"I only pretend to know everything, remember?" Natasha disconnected the ring camera and brought up another app. "What I do know is that Strong wasn't alone there. While you two were playing lawyers I took a quick look through the wikileaks data, the stuff that was already decrypted. I've got Strong's personnel files – he's actually worked at SHIELD since he was twelve – and I found two of the other names you mentioned as well. A man named Stanley Reeves was a forklift operator at Cheyenne, and a Scott Orchard was a pharmacist in the infirmary there. I'm emailing the stuff to you now." She finished that, and put both the phone and the ring back in her purse. "If you want to chase these rabbits, it looks like we're going to Colorado Springs."

"Are we sure these are two different rabbits?" asked Sam as they got back in the car. "The clone thing popped up while we were looking into the Albatross, and now we find out they both lead back to the same place."

"But what do dead clones have to do with a shipment of HYDRA weapons?" asked Steve. The clones certainly didn't fall into that category themselves – they were thin young men with a multitude of health problems.

Natasha was in the middle of doing up her seat belt when she stopped and grabbed his arm. "DNA-based targeting," she said. "Remember?"

That hadn't occurred to Steve, but he did remember.

So did Sam. "Like in Insight?" he asked. "Sitwell said they were going to find their targets by reading their DNA with a satellite. That would require a hell of a long-distance scanning mechanism."

"But we already know that an expert on scanning and imaging devices is involved," Natasha said. "And Strong can easily find the clones if he wants to. They probably trust him. He's one of them."

Steve could feel things dropping into place, and this time there was no surprise, only a leaden sense of inevitability. "Strong was afraid for his own life, though," he protested. "Unless that was just an act..." What was it Strong had given as his reason for identifying Reeves' body? That's what a normal person would do? Steve didn't always like Tony Stark very much but he respected the man's brain... the idea of a mind like that dedicated to HYDRA was an uncomfortable one in the extreme. "And if they're testing a DNA targeting system on my clones, then it's easy enough to guess their endgame."

"Yes, it is," Natasha agreed.

This really was personal. "Well, he knows I'm in Tampa," said Steve. Was it just revenge, he wondered, or were they planning something bigger, and wanted to take Steve out before he could cause them any more problems? "I guess we're going to Colorado."