The seatbelt sign switched off as the jet departed McGuire AFB. The team of a dozen agents aboard, lead by Rushman and Hawk, unbuckled and began to discus whatever leads they had and following up on them through contact with field offices across the nation.
As Rushman talked on the phone to the Falsworth family butler, Hawk sat in a seat opposite to her and conversed with the Nebraska State Patrol. The day before there'd been an incident at a truck stop, a potential hate crime against a family of Algerian descent averted through the interference of a man matching Rogers' description.
Normally they'd operate more overtly, send out BOLOs and enlist the aid of the Feds, but since Fury wanted to minimize the possibility of anyone outside SHIELD finding out about the Captain, they were down to chasing down leads like that, quite many of which were flimsy.
Hawk asked as he hung up the phone, moments after Rushman had did the same,
"How'd it go?"
"I spoke to Mr. Chapman. He went through the entire Falsworth estate. He had the house waiting staff search every room, even went over the charity donations over the years… Nothing, no footlocker."
Hawk rubbed the back of his head.
"Was he thorough?"
"He was very thorough."
"Alright, then. No footlocker." Said Hawk, lowering his hands, "We find him some other way. We've got the travel routes he'd been looking at from his hard drive, we know he was in Nebraska. We'll find him soon enough."
"I hope so, or we're going to be outclassed by someone who hasn't mastered the use of FaceBook."
Hawk picked up a file and began to leaf through it.
"He's an old school guy, that's exactly why he's gotten so far."
"Old school?" asked Rushman.
"Yeah. Me, you, these guys, the guys we're usually after; all accustomed to the cyber-age, wouldn't be in our element outside it. He's not used to it, so he's operating on a different level."
"Old school?" she asked again, as if she hadn't heard a thing he said.
"…Yeah." Said Hawk, confused at her not knowing of the phrase, "Old school. Idiomatic, of the ways or styles of bygone times."
Rushman continued to look at him quizzically, until he noticed she was actually looking at nothing in his direction. He shook his head and turned his attention to the file in his hand. He read through it for a few minutes then looked back up. She was now looking at him in a way he'd seen before, like she'd thought of something and wasn't sure if it was worth pursuing.
"What's on your mind?" he asked.
"You fought in Kosovo, right?"
"Yeah."
"When you ring up your old war pals, do you introduce yourself as … What was your rank?"
"Corpsman 3rd Class. And I don't."
"Rogers did."
"What are you talking about?"
She leaned forward in her seat, Hawks' answer having served to lend credence to her theory.
"The phone call between Jones and Rogers. Rogers introduced himself as Captain Rogers. Doesn't sound like something old friend would do, does it?"
"Maybe if you're an officer it does. Or a slip of the tongue. It happens."
"Alright, what would you say about the Professor's mental state? Is he still sharp?"
"Oh yeah. Sharp like a mother…"
"Yet he mentioned a luger being one of the contents of Rogers' footlocker, twice. He even noted his mistake."
"He's still old, he must have his bad moments."
"I'm not so sure about that." She said, "He caught himself a little too quickly. It sounded more like it was more for the benefit of whoever was listening. And another thing, does Captain America strike you as the kind of person who'd keep war souvenirs?"
"Man liked hurting Nazis, so maybe. I don't know."
Hawk's interest was piqued, he produced his smartphone which carried a recording of the discussed phone call. He listened to it on headphones.
"There were your medals, a Luger, your photographs, a bunch of letters and a Luger. Did I already mention that? Sorry… Did I already mention that? Sorry… Did I already mention that? Sorry…"
He listened that last fragment of the conversation a few times. Just like Rushman had said, there was something to the way he talked. Something in his tone, or perhaps something missing. Perhaps the mention of the luger twice was deliberate.
"Alright." He said, taking off the headphones, "You're thinking that Jones and Rogers were talking abut something aside from Rogers' stuff from the war, like some kind of subtext. Right?"
"Precisely." Rushman said. At that point, they'd gained the rest of the team's attention, who were listening to every word.
"You mentioned the Captain being 'Old School', perhaps he was communicating something through a code both he and the Professor are familiar with. He introduced himself as 'Captain Rogers' to signify that he doesn't want to receive sensitive information overtly on the phone. Whatever comes next must hold a different meaning. The footlocker provides a pretext for the coded-message to be delivered and also serves as a misdirection.
"There might not even be a footlocker."
Hawk thought about it, which he didn't have to do for long.
"Alright. It's be worth a shot." He said, before turning his attention to the rest of the team, "Boys, you've heard Agent's Rushman's theory. Who knows how to follow this up?"
Pairs of agents began to discus the matter. As Hawk was looking for one of them to deliver, a young, female, blonde haired agent spoke up.
"I'm not a boy, but Jeff Hurst at the academy knows more about the SSR operations than anyone else. He might know about any code system the Howling Commandos used."
Rushman got on the phone, while Hawk addressed the female agent, and the rest of the team.
"Thank you, Agent Morse. The rest of you, continue following your leads. Steve Rogers has been in the wind for over forty-eight hours. It's day three, and it's time we got him back home. He does not make it into day four."
He'd made it. Almost the entire way across the country. He was there, walking down a street in the Alameda district of Portland, Oregon. From his perspective it was less than a year ago, though in reality it was closer to seventy, that he learned the address he'd arrive at momentarily. He still wasn't sure what he'd do once he got there. He figured he's play it by ear once he got there.
As soon as he arrived, and he knew it was the place, he realized something wasn't right. The house looked modern, though imitating a past style. He stood staring at it for minutes. It was far too late, and he wondered what he could do now.
"Are you a Marine?"
Snapped out of his thoughts, Rogers found the source of the comment. It was a kid, no older than fourteen; vaguely Hispanic, smallish, with short curly hair, and wearing a basketball T-shirt. He held a basketball in his hands and wore headphones in one ear, allowing the other to hang on his chest and blare with the sound of modern music, which genres Rogers hadn't really begun to explore yet; something loud and jumpy, crass by the standards he was used to yet vibrant.
"No." Rogers said, "I was in the Army. Why?"
"Nothing." The kid said, "I'm thinking about joining them when I'm Eighteen. What's the Army like?"
"Well, there were a lot of good men in it. Do you live around here?"
"No." The kid said as he gestured toward the house next door, "My grandfather does."
"Do you know who lives here? The Roarks?"
"No, the Kincaids live there. I think they're gone on vacation."
The revelation brought something down inside him. "Thanks." He said dejectedly.
He was about to leave and head for the nearest bar. Maybe even call SHIELD and tell them where they could arrest him. He cast one last look at the kid, and noticed something about the way he moved the basketball in his arms.
"How'd you hurt your elbow?"
"Basketball try-outs." He said, something disheartened in his voice, "The other kids were kind of rough."
"Did you get in?"
"No. The coach said I didn't have what it takes."
Rogers though that sounded familiar.
"What are you listening to?"
"Gnarls Barkley. Do you listen to them?"
"Can't say I do. I'm mostly into older stuff."
The kid noticed a car turning the corner, heading in their direction.
"That's my granddad. I should go inside. Homework to do."
Rogers gave him a nod as the car pulled into the drive way.
"Hey kid." Rogers called after him.
"What?"
"People will always tell you don't have what it takes, for whatever it is. Don't listen to them."
The kid looked at him for a moment before retreating wordlessly into the house as his grandfather got out of the car. The grandfather was a man of his sixties, white, gray haired, bespectacled and fattish. He turned his attention to Rogers in suspicious protectiveness.
"Good afternoon, sir." Said Rogers.
"Hi" He said, "Can I help you with something, Mr….?"
"Lou Lambert."
"Tom Bowering." Said the man as she shook Rogers's hand cautiously.
"I was hoping to find the previous occupants of this house."
"You mean the Rileys?"
"The Roarks, actually."
The man didn't react for a moment, and his expression remained unchanged, as if he had heard nothing.
"The Roarks?" he repeated, "Lord… The Roarks never lived in that house. They lived in the one before it, back in the sixties."
"You knew them, then?" asked Rogers, hope rekindled inside him.
"Yeah. I knew them. I grew up right next door, went to highschool with Joey Roark, too."
"What happened to them?"
"They sold the house at the end of the sixties to another family and moved to California. A couple of years later it burned down, the family sold the land to the Kirkpatricks, they built that house right there. It was sold off a few times over the years. The Kincaids live there now.
"What do you want with the Roarks anyway?"
Rogers smiled. He answered Bowering's question with a story he made up. It took a little more talking to find out he was still in Christmas card contact with Joey Roark, and little more talking to convince him to provide the mailing address.
Bowering bade Lambert farewell soon after. While he was initially suspicious, the man he spoke to had one of those faces you could trust, and that had something oddly familiar about them. He joined his grandson back inside the house.
It was nearly seventeen hours after Rogers left Bowering that the secret of the exchange between Jones and Rogers was discovered. Rushman's team hand landed in Seattle, as it was believed that Rogers was heading for the West Coast, and the Seattle Headquarters, which Colonel Fury had only recently left, provided the resources required to track Rogers' suspected movements.
Jeff Hurst, a counter-intelligence tactics instructor at the SHIELD Academy had been hard at work, putting his considerable expertise and knowledge of the Strategic Scientific Reserve and its methods and going over their recorded operations to reconstitute the code system devised during the war for use by the Howling Commandos and their collaborating operatives by Captain Rogers and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Falsworth.
As Rushman suspected, there was another meaning to the message, and the list of possessions in the fabled footlocker. 'Medal' was a code word standing for the number '2', 'Luger' was for '5', and so on. Words like 'Bunch' stood for repetitions of whatever coded digit that followed, in this case three.
The list of possessions stood for a seven digit number, and when combined with a three digit area code, it would make a phone number.
Phone number with area codes corresponding to the vicinity of Jones' residence and surrounding areas were looked up and examined. Attempts were made to recover recordings of phone calls made since the original phone call went out and people were questioned.
At the end, they found out that shortly after the call, Jones used his live-in nurse's cellphone to call an acquaintance in downtown Philadelphia, and asked his acquaintance to deliver a message to a Mr. Hauptmann who would call sometime later. From Jones' acquaintance, it came to light that there was in fact a footlocker, and it was in the possession of the person no one would think to question about it. A helicopter soon departed from the roof, carrying Rushman, Hawk and Morse, heading to California.
Throughout the past three days, Rogers had been wondering how close were SHIELD to close in on him. He knew they were after him, they had to be.
Though he didn't know it, SHIELD hadn't yet learned about the secret exchange at that point, that was still hours away when he got off the bus in Los Angeles. He only needed a little more time, not even a day, to get the envelope, find out exactly where to go and go there.
After that he was done; SHIELD could arrest him, or confine him once again to their New York Headquarters. They could stuff him in a basement for all he cared. He just had to see this thing through.
LA was as insane a town as he'd imagined, he walked around a bit until eventually he found a payphone. He picked up the receiver, dropped the coin, dialed the number and waited for the other side to pick up.
"Mr. Stark? This is Steve Rogers … … … …."
R&R