Author's note: I haven't updated this in a reeeeeeeaaally long time! Feel free to reread the last chapter or two to refresh your memory on where it left off. I've been concentrating on my other story, The Third Life of Steve Rogers, but interestingly enough they are now approaching covering the same time period, albeit from different characters' points of view, so their plots are beginning to feed off each other.

(By the way, to anyone who may be wondering, this story was plotted out and largely written long before "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" began to air. So it won't necessarily match up with that series. Nor will it match up with certain developments on "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," which may already be apparent.)

Chapter 29

"You've got to be kidding me," Clint Barton said.

Agent 45 could not have looked more serious as he held out a parachute pack, and his grandson Roger stepped into the leg loops and shrugged it onto his shoulders, looking visibly nervous.

"Hydra?" Clint repeated in disbelief.

"Yes," 45 said briefly, helping Roger adjust the parachute pack's straps with the confidence of a man who had done it many times before, thanks to his service in Vietnam.

"That Hydra?" Clint said.

Agent 45's face was patient. "Yes."

"You mean a couple of wannabes, right?" Clint said in bewilderment. Behind Agent 45, his family were not-so-subtly listening to the two of them converse as the Quinjet rocketed toward their destination on auto-pilot. Sammy was looking at Clint with open pity while her sister Natty, face impassive, was tapping a pair of collapsible batons against her palms rhythmically. Further back in the cargo area, Amanda and Aliyah were sitting cross-legged on the floor facing each other with their eyes closed, whether meditating or praying or doing yoga, Clint wasn't quite sure. Amanda's husband Rob was pacing back and forth, wearing a bullet-proof vest over his mock S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform.

"That twisted old cult has been dead since the 1940s," Clint pointed out.

"That would have been nice," Agent 45 said dryly. "But you're welcome to see for yourself." He handed Clint a memory stick from his breast pocket, and went back to helping Roger secure his parachute pack.

"Here," Sammy said, offering her laptop to Clint.

By the time he was done reviewing the intelligence, Clint felt sick. He'd been picturing a handful of nutjobs being just canny enough to fly under S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar long enough to get control of an asset or two. But this... this was so much worse. Hydra was everywhere. In every department. And not just underlings... senior officers. People at the top, people whose names he knew. Jasper Sitwell? Dr. List? And most jaw-dropping of all, Alexander Pierce?

"Please tell me you double-checked this intel," he said faintly to 45, who had come over to sit on the jump seat next to him, having finished prepping young Roger.

"Hang on a sec," Agent 45 said. He got up and moved to sit on Clint's other side. "Sorry, what was that?"

Belatedly Clint remembered that 45 was nearly deaf in one ear, the result of a gun going off too close to his face during a long-ago mission, if he remembered correctly. "Tell me you double-checked this," he repeated.

"Triple-checked," 45 said grimly. "Quadruple-checked. You don't think I'd have brought my family into this if I wasn't absolutely sure?"

"But you're saying that the undersecretary himself-"

"I know. It was hard for me to accept, too."

Clint scowled at nothing in particular.

"I've spent my entire career working for the bad guys," he said, and the bitterness of the words almost choked him.

"I wouldn't exactly say that," Agent 45 said.

"I brought Nat into this. After everything the KGB put her through."

"That's on me, too. I advised you on persuading Fury to accept her."

"She has to know."

"She will," Agent 45 said calmly. "At the right time. I'm taking care of that."

"How?" He wasn't going to leave Nat's safety to chance, not even with someone as trustworthy as his old mentor.

"You think this is my whole team here?" 45 gestured at the others on the jet. "There are more of us back in D.C. We planned everything very carefully, Hawkeye. Nat's in good hands. I won't tell you not to worry about her. I know you will anyway. But I promise you she'll get out of this alive and well."

"And Steve-"

"There's no one alive who knows how to fight Hydra better than him. He'll be fine."

Just then, Agent 45's son-in-law, the cop, called out from the cockpit: "We're coming up on our destination. 30 minutes."

Clint felt a hot rush of adrenaline at the words. "I'll be damned if I let Hydra have that helicarrier."

Agent 45 slapped his back. "That's the spirit."

"So what's the plan?" Clint asked, pushing aside his worries and focusing on the task at hand. "Who are we dealing with when we get there?"

45 leaned over the laptop Clint was using and clicked on a file from the memory stick. "Commander Lisbet Castillo," he said as a S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel picture popped up: a middle-aged woman with a muscular build and dark hair cut short and practical above the collar of her uniform. "From Barcelona. Venezuela, not Spain. Her country was in chaos during her childhood back in the '80s: skyrocketing national debt led to standards of living dropping like a rock. Poverty, riots... and eventually several coups." Agent 45 sighed heavily. "Hydra's historically had pretty good success recruiting people from places like that. They're desperate for someone to promise peace. To impose order. Even at the cost of freedom."

"What's she like?"

"Smart. Good rapport with her crew. And, from what we've heard, pretty skilled at hand-fighting."

"We taking her dead or alive?"

"I prefer alive. She's high enough up in the chain of command to have useful intel."

"What about the rest of the crew?" Clint asked. "If these idiots are anywhere and everywhere, wearing the same uniform we are, then how am I supposed to know who's Hydra and who isn't?"

Agent 45 picked up the briefcase his son-in-law Quyen Ngo had given him back at Hoang Ky Su, opened the lid, and held it out. His family gathered around him and one by one, they reached in, took out a small device and attached them to one ear. Each device had a small square screen that positioned in front of one eye, like half a pair of sunglasses. Clint took the last one in the case and tried it on. A heads-up display activated automatically, and suddenly everyone he looked at through the screen was outlined in green light.

"Green is good," Agent 45 said. "Red means Hydra. Gray means we don't know. There's bound to be some of those, unfortunately. We couldn't exactly vet every single person in the entire agency."

"Not bad," Clint said, trying to hide his surprise. This must have taken some pretty sophisticated engineering, blending facial recognition technology with the good old-fashioned intelligence 45's team must have spent a lot of effort gathering, and the device was impressively compact and lightweight; apparently having a daughter who married a tech CEO really paid off.

"Once we land, you and Natty will head to the bridge of the helicarrier under the pretense of a surprise inspection," Agent 45 said to Clint. Everyone else here probably already knew the plan, but they bunched around Agent 45 and listened respectfully anyway. "Sammy, Rob, Amanda and Aliyah will stay up top to 'inspect' the Quinjets on the tarmac."

Sammy held up a slender electronic device, and Clint saw that the other three had identical copies of it. "I've designed a computer virus that will prevent them from scrambling the jets once they realize what's really happening," she said in her soft voice. "As long as we can get these within 6 feet of each Quinjet's computer processing core, we'll be good to go."

"If all goes well, this jet will be the only one left operational," Agent 45 added. "I'll stay on board to guard it."

"Once the jets are disabled, Sammy will meet us on the bridge," Natty told Clint. "At that point it'll be our job to keep Hydra off her back while she takes control of the helicarrier."

"You realize, I assume, that the helicarrier can be controlled from the tower once they see they've lost control of the bridge?" Clint asked.

"That's what Roger's here for," Agent 45 said, slapping his grandson's shoulder as he stood there wearing his parachute pack, his young face intense with concentration. "We'll drop him off over Singapore in just a few minutes, and by the time we've landed on the helicarrier, he'll be in the control tower and doing a little hacking of his own. Any questions?"

No one spoke up.

"Okay. Here we go." Agent 45 spread his arms out, and everyone huddled up close around him as if responding to a prearranged signal. Clint found himself brought into the circle, too, as everyone put their hands on the backs of the people beside them.

"We're going to go out there and do our duty, and we're going to make a difference," Agent 45 said simply, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the engines, but his family's eyes were riveted on him. "The world doesn't know us, but they need us, and we won't let them down." He paused. "God bless America."

"And God save the Queen," everyone else responded in unison. It was clearly an old ritual of theirs, based on the amused smiles they exchanged as they said it. It wasn't immediately clear to Clint why they would pledge allegiance to America or England; after all, no one here was British, and half the people here were just as Vietnamese as they were American. Some kind of in-joke, he assumed.

"Roger, you all set?" 45 asked, and the young man nodded seriously. 45 strode over to the cargo door and hit the release.

Clint had assumed earlier that Roger was Sammy's son, since they had been introduced together as computer experts, but to his surprise it was Natty who took Roger's face between her hands and planted a firm kiss on his cheek as the Quinjet's ramp opened up, letting in the howling wind.

"Mom," he said with faint displeasure, leaning back away from her in embarrassment.

"Good luck," Natty said, ignoring this. "You'll do great. Just... be careful, okay?"

Roger lowered his goggles into place and looked at her with his eyes bright and one side of his mouth curving up in a faint smile that bespoke the kind of confidence that can't be faked, only felt, and for a second Clint was startled; there was something hauntingly familiar about that expression, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Then Roger turned, took two big strides, and jumped out of the plane. Natty clung to a handhold and watched as her son rapidly dwindled to a dot in the sky, while the wind tore at her and blew a few strands loose from her bun. Finally Agent 45 leaned over and resealed the door, pausing to kiss Natty briefly on the top of the head before heading back to the cockpit.

"How old is he?" Clint asked.

Natty's eyes were distant, but after a moment she answered matter-of-factly without even looking at Clint:

"Fifteen."

"You thinking about getting out?" Sam Wilson asked Steve.

"No," Steve said quickly. His single word echoed down the empty hall of the V.A., and then honesty forced him to amend it to: "I don't know."

Sam nodded encouragingly and waited.

"To be honest, I don't know what I would do with myself if I did," Steve admitted.

Sam assumed a too-thoughtful expression. "Ultimate fighting?"

Steve couldn't help but laugh.

"It's just a great idea off the top of my head," Sam said with an answering grin, and then said more soberly, "But seriously, you could do whatever you want to do. What makes you happy?"

"I don't know," Steve admitted.

Footsteps approached them, and they both looked to see a janitor pushing a mop broom toward them. Outside the windows, the light was dimming as the sun set.

"Looks like we're about to get kicked out of the building," Sam said. "You wanna go get a drink?"

Steve felt a pulse of relief. It was like he thought: Sam Wilson was perceptive enough to see what he needed, and kind enough to offer without making a big fuss about it.

"Actually, I think I forgot to eat dinner," he admitted. Between his return from the Lemurian Star, his argument with Fury and his visit with Peggy, it had been a very long, very strange day, and he had only just noticed his stomach starting to growl.

"Well, there's a great little Chinese place about a block away," Sam said. "I'm there just about every week for their broccoli and beef; I think they're about ready to dedicate a table to me." He chuckled, then added: "Or if you're in the mood for something else..."

"No, that sounds great."

"All right. I just gotta clock out first." They walked back to the lobby, where the girl at the front desk was gathering up her purse and getting ready to go.

"Is that the girl you wanted to impress?" Steve asked Sam in an undertone.

"That's the one," he confirmed quietly with a gleam in his eye. "Jasmine. Cute, right?"

"Should I do the Captain America routine and talk you up?" Steve murmured.

Sam shot him a broad grin. "I wouldn't stop you if you did, let's just put it that way."

So he did, and within a few minutes, Jasmine was shooting awed looks at Sam as Steve found creative ways to insinuate that the two of them were the very best of friends without letting on that they had only met a few days ago.

Her laundry finished and her apartment tidied up, Sharon Carter had just put on her most comfortable scrubs and curled up on the couch to do some reading before bed, when her phone rang. She glanced at it and saw Brock Rumlow's name on the screen.

Well, well, well. Apparently there was a first time for everything.

She accepted the call and put it on speaker phone. "Agent 13," she said crisply.

"13? I need Rogers' location from you," Rumlow's voice said without preamble.

Sharon suppressed her irritation. Would it kill him to talk to her like a civilized human being? She didn't need 10 minutes of small talk, but a simple "hello" would have been nice. She'd been going out of her way to be nice to him over the last year, but she was starting to feel like it had all been a massive waste of time.

"Then call him," she said a little shortly. "You have his phone number."

"He isn't answering."

Sharon knit her brows. Rogers wasn't answering his phone? Operatives at his level were required to have their phones on at all times in case of emergency. Well, maybe he couldn't hear it over the noise of his motorcycle engine. She thumbed open the tracking app and quickly saw that couldn't be the case after all; he had arrived back in D.C. and his motorcycle was stationary, located in the underground parking for the V.A. office. The V.A.? What was he doing there at 9 o'clock at night?

"You're still tracking him, right?" Rumlow asked.

"No, I stopped doing that a long time ago," Sharon said, swiping the app closed.

"Don't feed me that line. I know Fury still has you watching him."

"Look, if you want Rogers' whereabouts, then you'll have to call Fury to get it," Sharon said.

"I can't," Rumlow said shortly. "Fury's missing."

Alarm shot through Sharon, making her sit up straight. "Fury's missing?"

"That's why we need Rogers. So he can find Fury."

Sharon's mind raced, trying to catch up. "What about Hill? Doesn't she know where either one of them are?"

"Hill's incommunicado. She was in Manhattan, but now she's off the grid."

"What is going on?" Sharon murmured, more to herself than to Rumlow.

"That's what we'd like to know. Give me Rogers' location so we can straighten this out."

"I don't have it," Sharon said, although a thread of uncertainty made her uneasy. Something pretty bad must have happened to send both Fury and Hill off the grid, and Rogers really was the logical choice to find out what it was. But Fury had been adamant that no one but him, Hill and Sharon herself could have access to Rogers' private information. Giving it to Rumlow now was out of the question.

Rumlow hung up without saying another word. Quickly, Sharon dug her hand-held radio out of its hiding place in a false drawer, the one Hill had told her to use only for emergencies. This definitely qualified.

"Hotel?" Sharon said into the radio, using Agent Hill's code name. "This is Tango. Over."

The channel crackled to life, and a man's voice responded. "Tango? This is Golf."

Agent Goodman? He had been one of the agents assigned to assist Sharon back when she was watching Rogers in New York. Why was he on the line?

"Where's Hotel?" she asked. "I've got a situation here."

"Wish I knew," Goodman answered flatly. "She called me about 45 minutes ago, told me to watch this line in case you called. Said not to try to contact her, no matter what happened. I'm supposed to help you with anything you need. That's all I know."

"Well, what about Foxtrot?" Sharon asked.

"You don't know?" Goodman asked after a short pause.

"Know what?"

"Turn on the local news," he said.

Frowning, Sharon hunted around for the remote and turned on her TV. Then she leaned forward, intent on the screen. There were multiple news crews training their cameras on an area in downtown D.C. that had been hastily barricaded from the public, and law enforcement officers were striding up and down the closed streets, collecting evidence. There were smashed cars left and right, broken glass everywhere. The news anchor was saying something about a high-speed chase through some of the most heavily trafficked areas of the city, although details were still sparse.

The news helicopter circled around one vehicle in particular, a sturdy black SUV that had flipped upside down in the middle of the street. Sharon's eyes widened in shock as she recognized it: it was Nick Fury's own armored vehicle.

"Oh no..." she whispered.

"You said it," Goodman agreed grimly.

Something jarred Sharon's door loudly, making her jump; more of a vigorous thumping than a knock.

"Hang on a sec," Sharon said to Goodman, and she scrambled to her feet and quietly tiptoed up to the peephole and looked through.

Brock Rumlow was standing out in the hallway, dressed in black S.H.I.E.L.D. gear and looking irritated.

Sharon stared out the peephole for a long moment, heart racing. That was fast. That was really, really fast. Rumlow must have already been in the building when he called her. He had probably come here to verify that Rogers wasn't home. There wasn't a doubt in her mind that he was at her door now to press her again for Rogers' location. Suddenly Sharon got the sick feeling that Rumlow wasn't going to leave until he got what he wanted. And all the backup she had was Agent Goodman. No Fury. No Hill. That was it.

Sharon hurried back over to the radio she'd left lying on the couch.

"Golf?" she said quietly into it.

"I'm here."

"Rumlow's at my apartment," she murmured. "He's looking for Rogers. Do me a favor, and if I don't call you back sometime in the next five minutes, come and check on me, okay? I don't think he'll take no for an answer."

"I've got your back." He sounded so quietly matter-of-fact that Sharon felt genuine relief. She switched off the radio and shoved it back into its drawer just as the thumping sounded on her door for the second time. She hurried over to the door and opened it.

Rumlow gazed at her levelly. "I need that location, 13."

"You aren't in the chain of command over me, Rumlow," Sharon said, keeping her tone slightly bored. "This isn't appropriate."

"File a complaint after we've located Fury," Rumlow said, his dark eyes boring into hers. There was a shuffling sound coming from a little further down the stairs, and she knew then that some of his STRIKE team was there to back him up.

"Undersecretary Pierce is personally overseeing the search for Fury," Rumlow continued, his voice a little rough, as if he'd been shouting himself hoarse recently. "He's authorized me to do whatever I have to do to locate him. You clinging to some technicality while Fury could be captured? Injured? Held hostage?" He raised his eyebrows. "That's not gonna help the director, is it?"

Sharon hesitated for a long moment.

"Look, no one has to know I got the information from you," Rumlow continued, his voice going a little softer. "We can keep it between us. Just tell me where Rogers is, and I'll take care of the rest."

Sharon looked down for a long moment, and then sighed heavily.

"He's in Philadelphia," she said reluctantly.

She expected him to be relieved that she'd given in — or at least appeared to — but if anything, Rumlow grew more tense.

"Philly?" he barked. "Now? Where in Philly?"

"Independence Hall."

"Independence Hall?" he repeated incredulously.

"It's where they signed the Declaration of Independence and the Const-"

"I know what it is!" Rumlow snapped. "What's he doing there at this time of night?"

"What do you think?" Sharon said with some impatience. "He's Captain America. They probably having him doing some publicity thing. Fundraiser, or filming a documentary or something, who knows. But that's where he is."

Rumlow studied her for a long moment, and then turned around and walked away without another word. Sharon leaned out onto the landing far enough to hear Rumlow's quiet order to his unseen men as they jogged down the stairs: "Call Jiang in Philly. Tell him Rogers is at Independence Hall, and to get eyes on him double-quick. Tell him I'm on my way."

TO BE CONTINUED

Author's note: I'd love to know what you think! Feel free to leave a review.