8. Fodor's Travel Guide

. . .

"I'm that well known for my sense of humor, huh?" May quirked a dry almost-smile at Natasha, trying to defuse her and not really expecting it to go down that easily.

"No, but there's always the first time. I kinda hoped this was it." The infamous 'black widow's' arms stayed crossed and her body began to relax into an easy pose – the kind that could lead to an instant kill in most fights. To his credit, Loki stayed stock-still behind Simmons. At a glance, May could tell he was painfully aware that he was benefiting from a kind of human shield.

To his equal discredit, Loki opened his mouth before May could try to kick him. "Is this perhaps a good time to apologize for an unforgivably – if at the time purposefully – rude encounter?"

May shot him a look hot enough to toast Greenland from space. Remarkably, he shut up again.

"Are you serious? I know exactly what you said to me." Natasha looked at May, still in that easy, incredibly dangerous dancer's pose. "Does Phil know he's gone crazy? What the hell is this?"

"I told you-"

"I'm looking for more." An arm raised to point at Loki. He refused to budge, but he did blink. Once. Hard. "Why is he here?"

"Because he's on this case, and he's pulled his weight so far." May glanced over as Simmons pulled the bagged envelope out of her coat to demonstrate. She arched an eyebrow in approval. The exchange didn't do much to change the tense look on Loki's face.

"это пиздец. I mean, you have to bekidding me."

"Nat." May slumped her back against the wall. "It's Phil's call. I promise, he hasn't gone crazy. I can brief you, but I'm serious, it'll take hours and you'll want a drink. Or, you know, ten."

The pointed finger swiveled to May, where it became distinctly less threatening. "We're still on for next month, right?" She watched as May nodded, dropping the other shoe. "You're buying."

May pushed away from the wall, acting shocked. "I bought last time!"

"Extenuating circumstances." Natasha stared at Loki. None of the implicit threat left her face. "If he comes within five feet of me, I'm going to taze him until his bones glow. That's just to start."

May shot him a look of warning, knowing Natasha saw it too. This part wasn't over yet. She kept her voice light. "That's fair."

. . .

"Good lord! What did you say to her?" hissed Simmons under her breath at Loki before following the two senior agents into the deeper vault.

"I'm certainly not going to repeat it!" he whispered back, never taking his eyes off Romanoff and the various weapons he'd spotted hidden along the edges of her clothes. Of all the would-be 'avengers' he'd met, many could be gambled with or pushed about long enough to escape or overcome in some way. This one had been far cleverer than he'd expected. By the end of the whole mess he'd drawn two private conclusions – stay well away from Banner's fury, and the female was the deadlier of the species. Being dragged back to Asgard afterward was just fine with him. "It made sense at the time."

"What could possiblymake sense about permanently making Natasha Romanoff, of all people on the planet, deadly furious with you?"

He shook his head at her, not at all willing to rehash the past yet again. It struck him that there was a distressing familiarity between how Romanoff was reacting to him versus his earliest encounters with Melinda May herself. Much less Coulson.

Gods, but life has grown strange. He sighed to himself. Talking was never going to buy him any peace from her open dislike, he'd burnt out that option. Instead, the unlikely May must barter his position with the Director on his behalf, to keep yet another person with plenty of just cause from tearing his head off. Like May, he had no doubts Romanoff could invent some distressingly efficient method.

Natasha stopped at the far edge of the vault, accessing a digital panel with a series of quick inputs. One of the cases inserted almost seamlessly into the wall clicked open, and May moved to help her pull it further open. Another morgue's freezer, though this one was meant for a slightly different purpose. May talked as she and Natalie easily pulled the bag out. There was a smaller compartment attached, but they left its contents alone for now. "The way these new guys sliced up our victim after the fact reminded me of something else that came down the pike the last few months." She looked across her end of the bag at Loki. "You called it."

The bag dropped smoothly onto a table in the center of the room. Loki glanced at it and then at Natasha, whose tightly guarded expression expanded to add a thin layer of fresh disbelief to it. Loki kept his voice calm and steady, the only rational defense he had. "Called what?"

"Three victims. In your words: that we knew of." May sighed. "Turns out we've got at least five more bodies up and down the coast found with their spines carved out, filed as a separate federal investigation just weird enough that we'd gotten some reports. Not like what we saw at first, so it wouldn't connect. But since they got to Stutgart? Yeah, something's up."

"Is this one of the previous five?" Simmons asked.

Natasha shook her head. "This is old business. When May pieced both things together, she realized it reminded her of something I've dealt with before. So she called me." She unzipped the bag to reveal the open corpse, so frozen there was no smell. It could have been a statue. She put her hands down on the table and glanced at Simmons. "Take a peek. You won't miss it."

Simmons stepped forward and scanned the cavity, finishing with a small gasp as she saw the tiny marks along the spine – a different configuration, different patterning, but the slice near the base was similar. "Bloody hell. He was wired just like our Stutgart." She looked up, startled. "Who was he?"

"A Latverian deep cover agent of my extremely brief acquaintance." Natasha took a step back to rest her shoulders against the cool doors, crossing her arms and studying reactions. Simmons looked horrified. The unwelcome visitor looked at her, his expression careful but genuinely blank. She arched an eyebrow in response, her voice acidic and cheerful both. "Oh, he doesn't know?"

"Nat."

Loki watched the silent battle between what seemed to be two old friends before trying to talk, sticking firmly to that neutral, calm tone. "I've come across the name in the information that SHIELD has given me, but little else, I'm afraid." He let a touch of irony creep into his voice, not liking the way she studied him. It was as if the glass barrier between them never broke. "You've got me at a disadvantage."

Slow, unamused blink, followed by frosty silence.

May took a step and broke the caustic stare between the two, forcing Natasha to look at her instead. "Can I get a moment with you?"

Natasha strode out of the room as an answer, still staring over her shoulder at the demigod. May followed her out, glancing unreadably at her agents.

Loki cleared his throat, speaking lightly to the uncomfortable looking Simmons. "Well. I think this is going marvelously."

. . .

Natasha waited until the door shut again before whirling on May. "Come on. What's he got on you? Did he get the staff back, is that why Coulson's letting him walk around? You can tell me, Melinda, and we'll get this fixed. Meanwhile, we're just going to leave him in there with a vault full of SHIELD evidence? Do we not learn from mistakes anymore?"

"We do. That's the point." May absorbed her friend's long, angry stare.

"I can get Barton here in an hour for backup. He's going to scream and then possibly vomit when I tell him what I'm seeing." Romanoff looked away, still riled underneath a calm face. "I don't buy this. What's going on here?"

May shook her head. "Nothing. That's the hell of it. He's an agent now." She didn't blink at the disgusted noise Natasha made. "We need to get the job done, Nat. It started plain. Now we're looking at something that might go deep. That means we use everything we've got. You, me, him. He's my problem, let me deal with it. Work with me."

"Боже мой. You're already pulling the den mother tone on me. You know I hate that." She unfolded her arms and sagged against the wall. "Look, you know how New York went down. You know what we had on that guy. You can't just ask me to go along with this. You know what he is."

"Exactly right. I know what he's been. And what he is. Right now, believe it or not – and yeah, I understand the disbelief - he's a legitimate agent." Yes, she was doing the calm, unstoppable den mother voice. She kept doing it, knowing that the reason it annoyed Natasha was because it could work.

"Give me something for proof. Anything to hook into, before you ask me to drop high level intelligence with him even in the same zip code as me." The infamous agent rubbed hard at her forehead, thumb and fingers working the temples with a migraine coming in like a rocket. "Come on, Mel. Don't make me wait a month on this one."

May thought quickly. "New York again. Last year. The sinkhole that ate half of Greenwich Village."

"God. I got the after-report on that through Fury. Some sinkhole. Invaders from outer space wasn't enough, now we needed something from one of those horror novels about 'endless inner darkness' or whatever." Natasha stopped studying the floor and looked at May, waiting for the rest.

"You didn't get all of it. Nobody outside Phil's core team did, not even Fury. We played it close to keep people from hitting the roof. Was a risky call, but it paid off." May jerked her chin back towards the vault. "It was his fault again. No surprise there. Then... he fixed it. He made a lot of mistakes during that situation, and he made most of them right."

Natasha snorted, not convinced. "What was the catch?"

"No catch. For whatever reason, he'd show up now and then and have drinks with Phil. He did a job for us in Montana, no strings. Then, get this, he came to the Christmas party. God, I know how that sounds. Some other stuff in the mix, now he's here." May crossed the room, putting a hand on Natasha's arm. "Believe me. I know. Before this started, the first thing Phil did was pop him through a wall again with the Destroyer prototype."

That got a slim smile. "I remember the dev department started calling that thing 'Coulson's Revenge.' Kinda fitting. So you trust him now?"

"Nat, you know me better than that. I don't trust anybody." May laughed. "Just don't kill him right here, okay? Come on. I'll tell you the rest next month. Let's go tell the kids about that wonderful tourist destination, Latveria."

"I am going to order so much top shelf vodka, May. You are not prepared."

"I'll borrow the expense card."

. . .

The temperature in the room upon return did not exactly warm. The immediate threat in the spy's posture lessened somewhat, however, and so did everyone else's tension. "You don't know anything about Latveria because there's almost nothing to know." Natasha didn't bother to look at the demigod, her voice brisk and clinical. It was still an upgrade. "We've got what we call 'cold spots' in the world; regions with almost no publicly known or verifiable information. Most people think of North Korea when someone mentions no-go zones like this. There's much more than that." She finally glanced at him.

Loki resettled against the wall, content to keep still. Near him, Simmons wrung her hands together now and then.

"Islands we don't put on maps, portions of the Japanese coast, hell, we've got a whole landmass we've been keeping people away from inside Antarctica. But two are pretty notable – one's been keeping private in the central-northern African continent, and the other is Latveria. Hard carved out of the Banat region some fifty years ago, taking over little pieces of Turkey, Romania, and Serbia and making one of the scariest tiny nations on the planet."

She watched the alien incline his head with what appeared to be genuine curiosity. "How was that done? Do we know?"

We. Natasha didn't blink at his choice of language. "From what little we've found, at first a number of local disaffected Rromani and Hungarian communities banded together under one family. The von Bardas family, we know that much. They moved into the region from Austria after the world wars. The communities were sick of being abused and abandoned by the government. Von Bardas gave them an alternative." Natasha sighed. "Not a bad plan by itself. Except, around forty years ago, this small little struggling nation went dark. We heard a rumor of a coup, then something more sinister than that. Witchcraft. Murders. Travelers in the area shared tall tales about demon sacrifices, but none of it bore out. Then the borders sealed. By the late 70's, you were not getting in. But they were occasionally sending agents out to watch everyone else."

She turned and pulled the small package out of the joined compartment, glancing at the corpse. "Two years ago Google, of all damn things, nearly kicked off an international incident. They flew two experimental map drones over central Europe from a low-space orbit. Latveria knocked them down and we still don't know how. Their information got transmitted home anyway. The only thing they saw of Latveria was an open, blank space. Like an eraser scratched over the face of the planet. They're invisible to every tech device we've got. Five days after the drones got shot down, a single emissary came out of the country. She identified herself as Lucia von Bardas and got into four US Senator's offices, plus she wrangled a direct, private, and sealed communication with the President. The tone of the messages she delivered was a clear one: We are not to screw around with Latveria."

She tossed the package onto the table, pulling it open to reveal the bundle of wires that had once been inserted through a body. "Well. Someone is screwing around with them now. Your discovery of this before-and-after game with the bodies is bad news, tying up a few loose ends we were chasing elsewhere."

May looked at her agents, her expression grim. "The new current theory is someone is trying to steal Latverian tech, and they're murdering to do it."

Natasha nodded for emphasis. "This is an example of the stuff their agents are enhanced with. This set is not what the corpse I'm using as an example had inside him, because this guy burnt out his chip and his life himself before I could get him to admit he was operating on Latverian orders. That's the saving grace we've had so far; if their spies get caught trying to push our boundaries, they're disposable. It's part of the game. We can't ever verify the operator's origin one hundred percent, and they just won't bat an eye. Hardest poker tournament in the world." She gestured for Simmons to take a closer look. "Want to guess when this set was manufactured?"

"My goodness. Fitz would guess better than I, I think, but the cybernetic miniaturization is astonishing. Nobody's working on this level, except perhaps Stark, and even then I don't think he could produce it yet on a mass scale." She looked up, taking her hand away from the miniscule knot of wires and biochips. "I would have said quite recent. A prototype. I'll assume that's not close."

Natasha inclined her head with a thin smile. "This set was pulled from a different agent in 1986. I've heard the story on how that happened. It's not pretty. Whatever's inside Latveria's borders, it's operating on a tech level so advanced that they occasionally let things sneak out just to piss us off."

"Or to show off," said Loki, quietly shifting against the wall.

"Same thing."

He arched an eyebrow in agreement. "So what's different here?"

"At this point, it's looking like all eight known victims were Latverian agents. The problem is that none of them were active. Sleepers. By the rules of this twisted 'game,' that's meant off-limits. We watch,if we can find them. We don't touch until the buzzer goes off and they wake up to play."

"Or else sleeping, silent Latveria might grow upset."

The tense expression never left Natasha' face. "And the very real fear is that if they get upset enough, we're gonna find out what sort of big boom they can brew. They're sending out little bits of future tech like Kinder Surprises. They've never needed to play the open threat game on a global scale. Just the scraps we've seen is enough to make every nation in the world privately tiptoe around a country small enough to fit inside Rhode Island."

"Oh, dear," whispered Simmons.

Natasha gave the younger agent a grim smile of sympathy. "So. You guys found an envelope belonging to one of these sleeper agents."

"We did, yes." Simmons produced it again, handing it over to Natasha with a nod from May. "We didn't examine the contents at the scene. I wanted to get it back to our lab, just in case. Have you seen such things before?"

"Couple of the other victims we found on our end, found something like it about seven years back. It's a standard secret message gag." Natasha opened the plastic bag and pulled out the envelope, clearly unafraid of anything else that might be contained. Another quick gesture and she pulled out the folded paper inside, flapping it between bare fingers. "Again, it's never definitive proof. Nothing we can trace. They make sure of that."

Her next action unfolded the note, made of the same rough fiber weave.

"It's blank?" Loki rolled his eyes and slammed his back against the wall with obvious irritation. "We went through a certain amount of annoyance and trouble for the damn thing, please tell me there's more than that."

Unwillingly, Natasha quirked a tiny smile. "A little more." She pulled a small field kit from one of her pockets, tugging free a wire with an exposed end. The sort of thing that could be used to open a door or rig a vehicle. She wove the wire into the paper. "Nothing special about the charge they use to do this, unfortunately. But get this," she said, and then she shocked the wire to life with a flicker of energy from the kit.

A handful of the woven fibers flickered alight and pale green in the center of the paper, forming two words.

Come home.

As the electrical hum faded, so did the message.

Loki lifted a hand to his face and pulled down along one cheek. "The warning didn't come quickly enough. Other options became necessities. Our three and the needle." Natasha was staring at him. He didn't notice at first.

"And poor Mr. Stutgart never looked at his. Destroyed it instead. Why, you think?" Simmons looked up at Loki, who only shook his head. "And why the sudden change in motif?" She looked at May next. "The prior five, what, you're telling us they were killed and gutted where our three were first done cleanly, chemically, to remove their devices. To what purpose?"

"Our interlopers killed the first five. Latveria itself arranged the deaths of our three. To try and stop the interference from happening." Loki looked at Natasha, whose brows knotted in surprise. Then he looked down at the scientist. "To build a firebreak against this attack. Left the corpses as a warning to their hunters."

Simmons looked up at him, paling.

Natasha looked away, clearly hating that she was about to agree with him. "Yeah. Latveria started mercy killing their own agents when they didn't move out fast enough. Protect their technology, maybe their information. And all that that hasn't stopped whoever else is involved from trying to collect the corpses, which means they're persistent and foolish."

"So now we need to find out who's pushing on Latveria and get this finished before they get mad and lash out in a bigger way." May moved away from the door to regard everyone in turn. "We're going back to base to regroup and plan the next move. Nat, I'm asking you to join us. You're the only decent source we have on the country."

"Separate vehicles, yes?" Loki asked when Romanoff nodded to her, genuine hope in his voice.

May couldn't resist. "I thought she'd ride with you guys." She turned her head to look at Natasha. "I'm kidding."

The spy sighed. "You did grow a sense of humor, Mel. It just kinda sucks."