So this story took an unexpected turn for me. It's gonna be a wild ride, guys, cause even I didn't see this coming...
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It's two hours later, I'm sitting in a hospital hallway (they feel just the same in England as they do in America, with that creepy feeling that something bad is going to happen or has already), staring at the blood still on my shirt and slacks, and hoping I did enough. Nick Ryder is in surgery for a collapsed lung and a shattered rib, and he'd lost almost too much blood by the time the situation was under control and we could get a medevac. The doctors say it's my quick work that's the reason he didn't die before we got him to the hospital. I promised the kid I wasn't gonna let him down, whether he knew it or not. I'm glad this time I at least managed to get him as far as I could.
Clint sits down next to me. He took a bullet graze to the leg and appears to have strained a shoulder trying to shoot at such a high angle from the ground, but other than that he's still in fighting shape. And oddly enough, he looks relieved about something. He nudges my shoulder when the other agents turn back to the OR door. That wasn't Nat.
How do you know?
Nat would have taken the head shot. It's more of a risk but it guarantees they don't survive. She's a good enough marksman to have done it at that range.
I can see why despite the day we've had Clint looks like someone took the weight of the world off his shoulders. I feel the same. Natasha didn't do this; she didn't turn on us. Somewhere out there, she's on our side. Now we just have to convince everyone else. Someone set her up?
Whoever did is doing a damn good job. She's still out of communication. Even our secret back channels are giving me nothing.
Does Bitch-face know you're trying to contact Nat?
Nope. Like to keep it that way.
I nod. A doctor steps out of the OR and pulls Stevens and Kirke aside. From the looks on their faces it's neither good nor bad news. Clint is staring, must be reading their lips.
"Ryder's touch and go. The bullet and bone fragments are out, but he's not breathing on his own, and he hasn't come to at all since they picked him up. But he's stabilizing now that they've gotten some more blood in him."
"He has to…"
Clint takes my hand. "Hen, you did everything you could. Hell, you helped the kid when no one else was thinking of that. He has a chance thanks to you. That has to be good enough."
"It doesn't feel good enough." I know Clint's right. It's the way everything has to be in this job. I learned fast that while it might feel like we're superheroes, there's no real heroes in this place. Just people who at the end of the day tried to do the right thing. It's been a hard lesson to accept.
A nurse stops in the hallway. She's a serious looking woman with long black hair and a heavy-looking face. There's something a little bit off about her, and I wonder if she's had plastic surgery, because of the stiffness in her expressions. I'm so fine-tuned to everything people's faces say now, after so many years of training my own to do as much talking as my hands, that when there's something unusual it stands out to me as much as if she had her lipstick smeared. "Agent Barton?" She has a pronounced Irish accent. Northern Irish, to be specific. Nat taught me the subtle variations. Northern Irish was one of her personal favorites. She used to say she could move to Belfast if things ever went really bad, and never be found. My Irish accent, on the other hand, is absolute crap. She and I laughed a lot about my terrible imitations of her during those early training days.
Clint cringes just a little. He's not a fan of hospitals, doctors, or anything medical. Just being in here has given him the jitters; I could feel his leg vibrating against mine. "Yes?"
"We're going to need you to come to a room. That wanker of an intern who worked on your leg didn't clean it properly."
"I'll take care of it later."
"I'm afraid I have to insist, Agent Barton. It's a liability issue. We can't simply let you walk out without treating this properly. You might decide to sue us if something goes wrong."
"Can I just sign a waiver saying I won't do that?"
"I'm sorry. That's not up to me. Procedural dictates." She turns, shoes clicking on the tiles. "Follow me please."
I don't like this. Something about it screams wrong. I don't know if it's her face, or her insistence, or just this place, but I feel like Clint's going to walk into a disaster.
"Wait, I need to come too."
She turns and glares at me. "What are you, his bimbo?"
"I'm his interpreter. He's deaf. With all that legal mumbo-jumbo you're throwing around, you oughta know that he's entitled to have me back there with him." Fat lot of good I'm gonna do if this really is a setup, but I can't just abandon Clint to his fate. We go out together if that's the case.
"I suppose." The nurse turns back, walking stiffly to the end of the corridor. She turns us down two more halls before reaching one that I swear looks like the pysch ward of this place. This looks bad.
She opens the door of an unoccupied room. "Last bed toward the wall, please, Agent Barton." Clint sits, fingers twitching. They wouldn't let him bring any of his weapons inside the hospital, and I know he wishes he had his bow, or even his gun or a knife. I know I am.
If this goes bad, we're going out the window. Clint is signing small, but by now I know his shorthand signs well. Only three stories up. Sad how that's reassuring now. Three stories sounds like nothing to me. I've scaled much higher walls.
The nurse slams the door shut. Then she does about the freakiest thing I've seen all day. She pulls her face off. And then, even freakier, Natasha Romanoff turns around to face us.
The hell are you doing here? At least Clint seems to have caught up fast enough to ask her something. I'm still a little bit lost.
Hiding in plain sight. Sounds cliché but I say don't knock it if it works. She shrugs. "Well, that was a spectacular disaster."
Shouldn't we stick to signing? I don't particularly want us to get taken in for colluding with the enemy again. Especially since this time there's no talking our way out.
"Here, no one listens to all the crazy shit people are saying. We're just going to sound like another conspiracy theorist with a tinfoil hat and Doc Brown hair."
"That…is genius." She's so right. No one thinks to pay attention to people talking about government plots and cover-ups in a psych ward. We can pretty much say whatever we have to and no one will think twice.
"What the hell were you thinking trying to extract him? MI 7 should have handled it all."
"It wasn't our call. They put Agent Stevens on it, and that was her plan. Ryder was the collateral damage necessary to get to you."
"Why is Stevens running this op? She hasn't had a field assignment since she lost half her team in Guatemala." Nat sounds like the woman's name leaves a bad taste in her mouth. I feel you, Nat.
"I think she must have convinced Fury she was necessary. If it was up to about half of S.H.I.E.L.D. Hen and I would be sitting in a cell right now for being accessories to Karakoff's murder. I think she must have told them she was capable of handling us in case their suspicions were right. And probably convinced them she was the only one capable of taking me out if I turned."
"Well, I'm sure Fury will be none too happy that they don't have me and their meal ticket is on life support."
"He'd be dead if it weren't for Hen. They owe her big. But knowing Stevens, she'll find a way to spin this where she's the hero."
Nat frowns. "We have to get him out of there. As long as S.H.I.E.L.D. is anywhere near him, he's in danger."
It suddenly makes sense. Up to now I didn't realize the full implication of Nat's innocence. But the hit happened just like it would have had she been the guilty party. Meaning someone else only knew where Ryder was because S.H.I.E.L.D. went to them. Karakoff's death didn't mean anyone inside was involved. Lots of people knew he was brokering the deal and had the means to kill him. But they couldn't find Ryder until S.H.I.E.L.D. led them to him. "Because there's a mole."
"Ten points for obvious, Hen." Clint rolls his eyes at me.
"Yeah, well, there's another obvious thing you're all missing. We can't move Ryder." I'm well aware that Nat or Clint would be up and fighting with the kind of injuries the kid sustained. I've seen that firsthand. They're psycho. But Ryder doesn't have years of training and a very underdeveloped sense of self-preservation, or a ridiculously high tolerance for pain.
"If he stays here there's a one-hundred percent chance he's going to be killed. If we move him, there's about a seventy-eight percent chance. I'll take those odds."
This is the part that's been bugging me since I read the dossier, only I couldn't put it in words until now. "What is so important about this kid? He swears he didn't see the shooter." I know that for a fact. I read the transcript of his interrogation with MI 7 front to back three times on the plane. Nothing else to do to ignore Bitch-face.
"He knew the real plan Karakoff was pushing."
"Everyone knows about that. It's all people talk about at S.H.I.E.L.D."
"Karakoff's deal wasn't to stall the program. It was to collaborate."
"That's not what I've heard."
"He was going to bring the Brits in on it in the hopes they'd enforce some regulations. He was smart enough to know if he went to the government and said shut this down all it would do is go back underground. He wanted to bring it to light and make it legitimate." Nat's political savvy is certainly a step a head of most people's. She knows that sometimes you have to do things you don't like, maybe even think are terribly wrong, to prevent something worse.
"How do you know all this?"
"I've been talking to Ryder. He was my inside contact."
"Oh hell." Clint shakes his head. "That's gonna look bad on the investigation, Nat. It'll look like the two of you collaborated and him going in that room was your signal. Even if he swears up, down, left and right that you're innocent, once they know you two were talking to each other before the shooting it's all over. He's the one thing we had to prove you didn't do it and this blew it."
"Well excuse me for not knowing someone was gonna take a pot shot at his boss."
"That still doesn't answer how we can move him. We can't wheel a hospital bed down the hall and steal an ambulance and just hope no one notices."
"We won't have to." Nat's got that smug, I-know-something-you-don't-know grin. "We're going to walk him out of here. Ryder was Karakoff's show-and-tell exhibit. He's enhanced." I think I might need to pick my jaw up off the floor.
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I'm only slightly less shocked than Henley. This isn't where I was expecting the story to go. But now it's gone there and it looks like I'll just be holding on for the ride.