13. Family Matters

. . .

Loki stayed wedged back against the front seats of the large surveillance van as Natasha Romanoff rummaged agitatedly through one of the equipment bags she'd brought along. He watched as May and Skye conferred in hushed tones, sending the bad news back to Coulson at the Playground. He could hear perfectly well what that dire development was, but chose silence as the better part of valor for the moment.

Skye swung around on the seat, draping her elbow on the headrest while she watched Natasha study something in the bottom of the bag. "I've got a trace on Agger."

"Location?"

"Well, he's in his house right now, but tomorrow? Party." Skye flicked a hand to indicate the direction. "Guess some director is throwing a huge shindig for some upcoming flick, supposed to be some real Oscar bait. It's the Hollywood event of the season... for this week, anyway. He got an invite couple days ago, RSVP'd through all the fancy channels. Profile we got on him says he's definitely going. Got to go see and be seen, this guy. Seems like the sort to cruise the newbies, too."

At that, a neatly folded garment bag came out, Natasha unzipping it a couple of inches to study the flowing black fabric inside. "Perfect."

"You always pack a little black cocktail dress next to your ammo box?" Skye raised an eyebrow, realizing she was seeing probably several thousand dollars worth of silk and fine rhinestone detailing just laying around inside a heavy duty military go-bag.

"Yep." Natasha zipped the bag back up. She nudged her other bag with her knuckles. "Shoes, too. Strappy little seasonal numbers. Don't let the heels fool you." She managed a smirk, her brow still furrowed and tight under the tied back long hair. "I can run a marathon in 'em if I gotta."

Skye looked up at Loki towards the front of the van and mouthed damn at him. He looked back at her, still blank-faced in that way that usually meant he expected some sort of a fight coming his direction. She guessed she understood, Romanoff did look a little tense once she and May got back to the vehicle. She watched Natasha move a few matte black canisters around in the bag, the bottoms labeled heavily with dense technical language. "What're those?"

"Experimental mace."

Skye had a fleeting memory of Grant Ward playing the no-personal-space game, suppressing a shudder. That guy was still out there. Creeping. "Can I have one?"

The superspy gave a soft chuckle, still rummaging. "It's touchy stuff. If you concentrate it too hard on your target, there's a non-zero chance of setting their eyeballs on fire. Or that's what the tech guy told me, anyway."

"Can I have three?"

May watched the exchange, a little amused. She could tell who Skye was thinking about, just by the way a tight little line appeared between the younger woman's brows. She jutted her chin towards Loki, thinking of Coulson's early advice. "What's your read on this so far?"

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Natasha pause with her fingers knotting tight against the bag. A flicker of Loki's gaze meant he saw it, too. May lifted her eyebrow at him, functionally a command to get talking.

He looked uncomfortable but did. "The only things of value you found in there were tools to incriminate SHIELD and the various kits pulled from the dead. No other Latverian artifacts that you could identify."

"No. Nothing." May leaned back against her seat. Natasha still looked tense, but she was clearly listening.

"The paranoid value of that alone is remarkable. Latveria must keep a tight watch on their toys; all that can be stolen is from the cast aside bodies of their own servants. Yet there's your conundrum; silent spies with nary a whisper to track. If we did not know them, who did?" He allowed a light shrug, careful to not make it look flippant. "The answer is obvious. Latveria itself. I tell you nothing you did not observe. The real question is why."

Natasha leaned back on her heels, studying him. Her voice remained barely grudging. "Yeah. I listened to your friend Quinn's story about the tech deal. It's not out bounds for them to play with people's heads. But this isn't another show. The last three were a firebreak, you said. Latveria's still reacting like they're getting attacked, pulling their guys out of the game one way or another."

"Friend." He cleared his throat, looking out the window of the van as an early morning pedestrian strolled by without a glance. "Yes. Any strong leadership must keep close those things of value. Careful, tight borders have value. Sleeping spies have value. Active spies are a hedged bet, when they're put into play the spymaster knows to count that cost paid and gone till they come home safe. That game you've seen. You live it. And they killed their own, yes, but they did so mercifully. They would never sell their waiting spies to a foreign world for a laugh. That's a priceless resource – even outdated, as you suggest, an old knife kills just as well as a shining one."

May nodded, following along. By Natasha's grim expression, his words were matching suspicions of her own. "Yeah. Maybe not everything is family and bliss in Latveria."

"I'd wager whoever sold their own country's agents just might be clever enough to put the notion of blaming us into Agger's ear to cover their own treachery. It's not like SHIELD hasn't played their games before. They know the name. Yes, we've walked into more than a mixture of murderous, greedy agents. There's four strings to this knot – us, Agger, Latveria, and some other agent of chaos within. We've walked into what may be the start of a coup of some kind, some... revolution to be built upon. The true question is raised by the discovery of this new ruse – does Latveria's leadership suspect? Or will they bite the bait and lash at us?"

"And that's why I'm going to this party." Natasha shook her head. "Going to see what I can lift off Agger directly. We need to find out who's playing the fiddle here – I've got a suspicion, really the only reasonable one, but we have to be able to prove it. Chase it down, somehow."

Loki watched her tug a small device from the bag, pocketing it. "What suspicion?"

Another of those heavy pauses before she said anything. When she spoke, her voice was purely professional. "I'm going to play that close for a few. Want to know if I'm just jumping to the obvious, or if this does go back to some of the last old rumors we got." She zipped the bag shut, looking over at May. "I need a nap before the party. We got a safehouse close?"

"We do. You sure you want to do this, Nat? We called you in to consult on what you knew of Latveria, and while God knows I never refuse a chance to shake down a place with you, this is still our problem. I can get someone in there almost as easily."

Natasha rested her hands on her knelt legs, stretching her arms up while she shook her head. The tension was still on her face, mixing with something ferocious. "I want to do this. SHIELD's gotten exposed enough, gotten our ass stuck out to the wind plenty." She stood up and crossed her arms, leaning against the side of the van to study her friend. "I couldn't stop Hydra from tearing us up from the inside. None of us could. Not alone, not together. We did everything possible, but we couldn't stop the flood." She sighed. "I'm stopping this one. We've eaten enough punches for a while."

May looked away. If Natasha took something personal, there was little swaying her from doing something about it. One way or another. She resisted an urge to flicker a glance at Loki, knowing full well things weren't paid off there, either. "Not a lot of lead-up here. You might get nailed coming out of this one."

"Me? Never, May." Natasha snorted. "A lady always has an open door."

Loki cleared his throat. "Before we break for what remains of the night, I have one of those distressing, unwanted questions everyone just loves."

"That's a thing with him?" Natasha looked at May. "Is that seriously a thing?"

"It's a thing." May gestured to Loki. "Drop the other shoe."

"Say we find results. We name our antagonist and can thus press our cause and keep what's been regathered of SHIELD's good name. But we do not know who truly runs Latveria. We know nothing of their internal matters." He gave them one of his thin, ugly smiles. "What if the one content to drag us and possibly the rest of the world entire through Latveria's rage for their purpose is yet the better ally than what sits hidden inside those closed borders?"

"I hate when he does that." May rubbed a hand across her forehead, hard. Skye grimaced.

"It's just a variant of 'devil-you-know.'" Natasha shrugged, accepting the dire theory with hard-taught Russian stoicism. "That's not an easy call, and one that goes higher up the food chain."

Loki arched an eyebrow. "So that's the response? Keep to our path and let someone else worry about the possible outcome? It's all above our pay-grade?"

Natasha snapped him a sharp, hard look. "It's more complicated than that."

"Is it?"

She shot back. "We don't know what we're in the middle of, so, yes."

May raised a hand, sensing the start of a possible fight. "You're both starting from a good point, okay? It's not an easy situation from either angle, Loki, don't try to drill it down like that. Here's the deal – Latveria's been a sleeping giant. While we don't have a lot to go on, it's generally agreed that we're happier with them ignoring the rest of the world. At least for now. If they wake up and get us in their sights, we don't know what'll happen. Sure as hell we can't make that call from this van. So we get all the information we can, then we cut in everyone we need, and we make a decision based on that." She rubbed at the back of her neck, feeling the headache start. A nap was definitely the next step. "In a situation like this, it's extremely possible that no decision is going to be one hundred percent right. You should be familiar with that. Nothing is easy."

Loki was the one to look away, accepting that silently. May felt the tension in the air ratchet down again, some of the tightness in her neck easing off. "I'm gonna get the van started. We all need some downtime here."

. . .

Stabek, a suburb of Oslo, Norway

Canavan yawned, his partner matching it a second later. "I hate schedule shifts." He scratched at his upper arm under the sleeve of the plain black t-shirt he wore. The artist and the doctor both told him there was simply no way the removed SHIELD eagle tat could still be itchy, but he swore it lit up every time the temperature in the area around him dipped below freezing. He was still pissed about having to get it lasered off in the first place. He was a long-timer, a career loyalist. When they called out to see who was still standing, he'd shouted back at the top of his lungs. "Friggin' Hydra," he mumbled, apropos of nothing. Well, at least SHIELD learned one thing from all that – cut their head off, they were just going to come back bigger and badder. Coulson was good people. That was a change he'd been alright with.

"Random. But I hear that. You want some coffee?" His partner, Eggleston, hoisted himself up out of the kitchen chair to do a systemic check out the windows of the long-running safehouse. Their little corner of the world, leaving the light on for the few agents still out on the road. There were new ones every day, but not like it was. Not yet.

"Yeah. What's the bleat off the official lines?"

"Mostly usual crap." Eggleston grinned at him, playing dramatic. Canavan slumped against the doorframe, staring at him until he got on with it. "There's been a scrape for some intel; anyone with information on high level Roxxon, or, get this... Latveria."

Canavan laughed. "Man. That's gotta just be a routine call. See who's paying attention."

"Yeah, I guess. They put out a notice to ratchet up the general alert, though. Someone's being paranoid." Eggleston frowned down at the street. "Bakery delivery guy is running late. I want my frickin' breakfast."

"Maybe he had to park around the corner."

"Yeah maybe." Eggleston swiveled his head at the scratch at the front door of the small safehouse. "Guess you're right."

Still, training took over. Both of them checked their holsters, with Agent Canavan sliding into basic cover behind the door, with a clear view of his buddy. Eggleston called out a cheery good morning in touristy Norwegian, opening the door with deceptive care. His hidden hand was on his firearm. Just an ordinary morning, keeping watch over the world.

Eggleston all but disappeared a second later, the smell of something burning and a trace whiff of baking bones filling the air where he'd stood. Canavan didn't freeze, he pulled his arms up into firing position with the safety on his gun off.

Nothing came through the door, yet it swiveled open. Nothing.

Wait. Canavan's eyes narrowed when the air itself shimmered in front of him. He heard the soft clank of metal, and that was enough to warn him. He unloaded a full clip into the empty, wavering air. Where the bullets struck, he saw the split-second glint of a silvery alloy and an odd flicker of green. He could barely put a shape together from the ricochet – a wide, metal torso. I'm gonna get killed by a friggin' invisible Terminator!

He snarled, enraged that he was going to go like this. And then he vanished in the same whiff of disintegration that murdered his partner.

The Latverian construct observed its handiwork with multiple integrated sensors, sending its conclusions back to its handler. It identified the ideal position between several load-bearing walls. And then it self-destructed, utterly demolishing one of SHIELD's last safe bastions in the world.