12. Spies Like Us

. . .

Natasha Romanoff kept an eye on the high camera swiveling in the corner above the warehouse door, knowing that knocking the electronic eye out even temporarily would bring more attention than simply ghosting through it. "Three seconds," she whispered into the throat mic once she finished calculating its arc and range of vision, her words meant for Agent May who was leapfrogging along the path behind her. "Move. Now."

A single tonal sound was the response signal. As May moved unseen, Natasha slipped through the unlocked door and quickly scanned the new hallway for anything, any hint of a threat – shadows, sound, light, the creak of motion. There was nothing. Silently pleased, she kept moving, smoothly stalking up the hall and checking corners, her ears covering her own flank and finding only the distant rustle of May catching up. Night shift change at the warehouse had been targeted to take place between two and two thirty in the morning. Rolling through the brief window of distraction and charging as far in as they'd gotten so far was the sign of a currently successful plan, nothing to be proud about yet. The trick was staying successful and getting out clean and without detection. Then she would be content.

Her instincts lit up, sensing the approach in the way sound muted in the hall. May was behind her now, checking out the other end of the hall. From here, they could use hand signals. She glanced back to see her friend lift one hand in an empty, broad-palmed gesture. Clear. May looked back to meet her eyes, tilting her head. Which way?

Natasha looked at the ceiling, seeing the way the wires were strapped along the corners of the wall. She looked around the corner to see if they were coming or going, and if there were more of them. There were, down and to the left. She gestured to May to follow her. Left, she signaled.

May glanced up as she pulled alongside and saw what the spy did, nodding. She crouched. Gonna be a guard soon, she mouthed. Desk?

Full office, Natasha mouthed back. One of the wire bundles above was thick and dark, banded with red. She recognized it as a common internal security network line, though usually non-civilian targets didn't leave the wires out for intruders to see. Usual package included the wiring for an intercom system and something to rig for a full security checkpoint. Half the time, nothing was hooked up right. Beneficial to her line of work. This looked like it was going to be the good half.

Lock 'em in with a glitch?

Natasha shrugged. Yeah, maybe. Or... She flickered her gaze up at the wiring again. Multiple birds with one handy rock. Now a tiny smile filled her face. Draw them off, she mouthed. It would be more efficient, and possibly get patrollers away for a longer period of time while they searched the secure parts of the Brand warehouse beyond.

. . .

Natasha looked down at the sleeping back of the guard. Mimicking a request through the security line got the results she wanted, three other guards wandering off from the tiny office on a 'routine patrol.' It seemed like things were even easier than that. She rummaged through a compartment on her belt and came up with the tiny needle. It probably wasn't necessary, but hey. She'd been in the business too long to rely on likelihoods alone. She slipped the butterfly needle painlessly into the back of the guard's hand and juiced him up with the sedative. Two hours later, it would be totally gone from his system. Meanwhile, he'd just sleep hard enough to be complained at by his bosses for days. She looked up at May. "Been too long since I've done a civilian job," she whispered. "Used to it being a lot harder."

May smirked as she pulled her phone away from the security terminal. She wound the connecting cable up and put it away in her pocket. While Nat made sure the sleeper stayed out, she made sure they had copies of all the electronic 'keys' they might need. Quinn's cards got them in this far, but like Natasha, she was big on planning through contingencies herself. She kept her own voice just as quiet. "Maybe you're just better at it than ever."

"Flattery gets me everywhere." Natasha checked her gear again with quick, instinctive gestures. Then she pushed the man's half-full mug of cold coffee back two inches to where it was before she'd needed to move his hand. "Got a path?"

"Nexus of automated high-security tech coming up real soon here. Key I grabbed for that checkpoint is a dupe of Agger's."

"Sounds good to me. Can you run interference on the monitoring stuff from here, or are we doing it old fashioned when we get close?"

"Doesn't run from here. We need to approach." May stuffed her phone in her pocket. "Skye's still linked in, should be able to disable once we're in range."

. . .

Skye yawned up at Loki as he loomed over her in the observation van several blocks away from the warehouse. "Place looks like a maze in there." She tapped the screen as it filled with data from the signals the two agents' phones were sending out to her. "There's probably a joke in that somewhere."

"Probably?" Loki sighed, looking over the biographical brief of the current Roxxon CEO. "The only question is if this Agger creature is deliberate enough about his reputation to do it on purpose." He scrolled back to the top, selecting the hyperlink tied to Agger's nickname.

"Yeah, what was the deal with his rep again?"

"Certain of his employees refer to him as 'the Minotaur.' Not quite certain why, beyond standard hostility and intimidation tactics. Although he seems certainly devoted to those." He skimmed the attached file, reading the overview of almost a half dozen seemingly buried charges of physical assault against Agger's own employees. An additional note remarked clinically that four of those whistleblowers were now dead.

Skye snapped her fingers. "That's why I'm thinking of mazes." She looked back down at her tracking information, not realizing the intensity of the stare she was getting. "Yes, duh. Look, I'm distracted. They got some big dealie stuff in there and I gotta bypass it as soon as they get close." She checked some schematics from a military security company that she'd just pulled off a server that used to be secure. Well, that's what you get for having your 'secure code' on a system attached to the internet, she thought to herself, changing a handful of inputs on the fly to better suit what she needed. "Would have been easier to cheat and send you in there to fry the place a little."

"I'm not a skeleton key. There's value in your own careful subtlety."

"Also you're just the tiniest bit nervous about Natasha being around and would probably do anything to not wind up in a warehouse virtually alone with her in the dead of night on the off chance she'd come up with some way to actually kill you. Despite the whole durable alien demigod shtick." He made sure she could feel the stare that time. She didn't bother to look up. "Dude, it's totally obvious. She's not gonna try."

"Well, not while any of you lot are watching."

"House rules, dude. You don't drop your coworkers while on the clock."

"She'll wait until I'm sleeping, comes to that," he muttered, not feeling particularly soothed. "Far more tactical. A better advantage over me, find a moment of exposure in which I might not be able to withstand her attack. Further, I highly doubt she regards me as any sort of compatriot. I will not warrant that protection." He sighed and looked away, tapping the tablet against the back of Skye's seat.

"What the hell did you do to her? I'm assuming this was during your internationally famous 'hey, look at me, I'm a total diva jerkface with really evil-looking hair' phase, so it's not like I'm gonna be surprised."

"I was rude."

"We call that Tuesday. By the way, your hair still looks kinda evil. I got a travel bottle of shampoo in my bag, good for oily."

"Particularly rude." He ignored the teasing jab about his hair. It occurred to him to wonder which Romanoff hated him for worse – his vulgarly dramatic finale in the glass cage, or his intense series of threats regarding her hijacked friend. Or an unpleasantly even mix of both.

It was probably both. He found himself squinting down at the datapad, his expression pained. He hadn't quite won his battle against her, but he'd managed to score a cut or two. At the time, he would never have believed that the cost of that might come due. No, his new road was never going to be simple, nor completely free of old debts incurred through his acts of rage. A fresh start didn't mean the past he'd built merely disappeared. His attempts at courtesy now would not stave off her fury forever – a fury that might damage the place he'd found here, or successfully scar him in some way even Banner had not. He sighed to himself, quiet enough to be meant for his ears alone.

Skye rolled her eyes, still not bothering to look at him. "You do have a knack for that sometimes." Something pinged on her datastream. "Okay, shut up, I gotta open some doors here."

. . .

"You have a good team." Natasha watched the red lights on the ultra-high security door panels go green. "Picked some kid off the street and turns out, what, she's a hacker supreme? Making her your next super agent, May?"

"We like our strays 'round Coulson's house." May tried to not stress the plural too hard, deciding also against reminding Natasha that once upon a time she'd been a stray, too. No point in banging on about the topic. "Turns out pretty good for us."

"Maybe so far. Gotta watch out for the duds, though." She went quiet, using her side to push open the unlocked door silently, carefully. Her eye pressed close enough to the sliver the doorway was forming to get a look inside, yet far away to be able to duck to safety if there was trouble. There was still nothing. Clear, she mouthed again, then let them both in.

Agger's private workshop was a tight space; mostly lined with crisply clean metal shelves loaded with components. May swept the room with a quick glance and found things were marked by date and a series of acronyms that probably indicated projects. "Oh, hey, he's a neat freak."

"I love those. So much easier to rustle through. You know how many targets are total slobs." Natasha went straight to a shelf labeled for the month the first corpse missing a hunk of spine showed up, snapping open cases until she found the one she wanted. "Wow. Bet the cases are color-coordinated, too." She plucked the mostly-intact bundle of wiring, seeing where someone – probably Agger himself – had stripped the coating off some of the wires for electronics testing. The tiny chipset itself rattled inside a shatterproof glass bottle nestled in a plastic mesh. She picked it up out of its little nest to study it.

"Yep. They are. Going for these new crates he's got, see what's attached to current projects. What's that one?"

"Mid nineties set, I think, based on the wire thickness." She went to the next, listening to May rummage through the newest collections. "Late eighties here." She shook her head a few moments later, after checking a few more. "Makes me worry."

She could hear metal clink behind her. "About?"

"Nothing I can identify as recent stuff. Nothing new. Maybe they're not making new sleeper agents anymore. Maybe they don't need to." Natasha sighed. "The last active Latverian agent I got word about was three years ago, and he was so damn old, May. No wonder he never tripped any breakers. He had to have been one of the first they sent out, and the more I see, the more I think he might've also been the final one to get jobbed." She snapped the case she was studying shut and moved to the last of the five victims she knew about before May called her. "None of these victims did anything to draw attention. Not one of them was on our radar."

"Latveria was moving on to something else, let 'em lay low long enough that they built totally ordinary lives."

"How very Soviet of 'em. That doesn't comfort me, though. We've got enough drone tech on the civilian level here. Who knows what they're playing with now." Natasha shook her head. "Even without gods and gifted and everything else, the world sometimes feels like it's changing too fast for spies like us."

"We're keeping up." May shrugged, finding nothing in the first two crates and moving to the last one. "There's no changing the need or the adaptability of the human element in what we do, Nat. You know that better than anybody." The cheer left her voice as she opened the crate.

Natasha turned around, sensing the change instantly. "What did you find?"

Instead of answering, May looked up at her, face tight. "We're about to get played. They really didn't like someone coming in on their turf." She pulled the crate out and shoved the lid further back to show the spy the contents.

Natasha's expression smoothed over into cold, calculating consideration at the sight of the various cards, scraps of metal, and torn patches. Each of the patches held the familiar stylized black eagle against a white background. Trophies probably torn free when Hydra lit up the scene and broke their organization apart from the inside. "Okay," she said, dead calm and thinking fast. "This doesn't resolve our other problem, the one we came in here for."

"Just gives us some all new ones. Who was feeding them the names of deep sleep operatives." May snapped the crate shut, her face close to outright anger. "We're not going to get an answer to that here. Do we torch the place?"

Natasha scanned the room, eyes unfocused as her thoughts zeroed in on her next move. "Can't. We need it intact to buy time for my next idea. We light it up, they might freak and scatter."

May stood up, shoving the crate back into position with her boot. "Probably wouldn't change the outcome on our end. It's possible this is already active. I'm sending an alert back to Coulson the second we get out of here, get the warning out on the street. What's your play?"

"We're withdrawing to the van, right now. Prep your message. Do me a favor and tell your hacker queen to find me where Agger is right now, and where he'll be for the next twenty-four."