"Barton. Barton? Clint!"
Slowly the fog started to dissipate and a sliver of light made its way into Clint's consciousness. He opened his eyes and then immediately shut them with a grimace. "Shit!"
"Well, at least you're still alive. Mind telling me what the hell happened here and why we weren't already providing backup?"
Clint risked slitting his eyes open again, the tone of Coulson's voice let him know that he wasn't going to be able to sweet talk his way out of this one. Even the limited light he was letting in was making the ache in his head throb like he'd just woken up after an epic bender. He tried to turn his head and almost fainted from the lightning arc of pain that travelled up his neck as a result. "Aw shit, what happened?"
"And here I was hoping you'd be the one giving me the answers," said Coulson wryly.
"From what I can see," he added, sweeping the room with a glance before returning his even stare to Clint's face, "you walked alone and without backup - directly in contravention to SHIELD protocol I might add - into the Black Widow's den and proceeded to allow her to incapacitate you without even putting up a token struggle. Well done."
"Well at least she didn't kill me," Clint mumbled somehow managing to pull himself up to a seated position and rubbing the back of his head for all the good it did him. It still felt like someone was banging on his skull with a jackhammer. He could now see the other agents moving around the apartment in his peripheral vision. He sighed as he realized what a jackass he must look like to them.
"Yeah," said Coulson looking a little more closely at Clint, "I was starting to wonder about that. You may be the only known person to have survived a meeting like this with the Black Widow. Certainly the first male. I was frankly expecting to come in here and have to pull you out in a body bag. Care to explain how that happened?"
Clint sat back, leaning against the couch, and looked Coulson in the eyes. "Damned if I know."
Coulson returned Clint's look stare for stare then sighed as he pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Clint, you know I trust you. I want to believe that this wasn't the clusterfuck it looks like, but I'm going to need a bit more than that to go on here. What are we dealing with? It took us months to even be able to track the Black Widow down, if she just disappears into thin air again after we came so close then it's not just going to be your head on the line."
"I know Phil, I just," he sighed, "I tried to recruit her. I tried to bring her in."
Clint was rewarded with something he had never seen before. Phil Coulson was speechless. After several beats Coulson seemed to regain something approaching his regular composure, though he was still shaking his head as though trying to rid himself of a particularly bad dream.
"You…tried to recruit…the deadliest assassin SHIELD has ever come across? After a months' long search costing millions of taxpayer dollars and untold manpower hours that finally resulted in tracking down the most elusive enemy agent on record you exposed yourself and possibly facilitated her escape despite being ordered to neutralize the target at all costs? Am I…am I hearing that right?"
"Yeah," Clint sighed, "that about sums it up I think."
Coulson let out a long, slow sigh. "Wow."
The mobile operations headquarters Coulson was using was a beehive of activity.
Communications personnel and analysts were speaking into headsets and typing madly at computer keyboards trying to find any intel they could on the possible whereabouts of Laura Matthers, aka Yelena Belova, aka Nadine Roman, aka Natalia Romanova, aka the Black Widow.
"Sit rep," barked Coulson as he walked in, a seemingly docile Clint Barton in tow.
"No results on CCTV in or around the apartment."
"Agents report no sign of the target at Cross Tech."
"Just collating known travel patterns and canvassing all airports, bus stations, and train stations."
"Checking on possible safe house locations in a ten block radius of her apartment."
"Chatter on the intelligence spectrum is nil."
"Great. So what you're telling me is we have no leads?" asked Coulson, sparing a pointed glance for Clint.
"None yet, sir," said Alisandra Morales, Coulson's second-in-command on-site, as she walked up to meet the two new arrivals. She was doing her best NOT to look at Barton.
Couslon sighed.
"What are we going to do about this, Clint?"
Clint shrugged. "She's not leaving the city, so at least that's one worry off our list."
Coulson turned a dubious glance at his protégé.
"Oh? She's just been informed, on very good authority I might add, that SHIELD has had her in its sights for termination for at least the last few weeks. Her cover at Cross Technologies has effectively been blown, and she's only managed to escape due to the incompetence of the agent assigned to neutralize her. Can you give me one good reason why she wouldn't be halfway back to Moscow by now?"
Clint ignored the provocation and simply said, "She's not with the Red Room anymore. Returning to Moscow would be as much of a death sentence as LA might seem right now. She also has reason to believe that SHIELD might be open to negotiations and is quite possibly her only option short of going freelance."
Coulson clicked his tongue, but didn't say anything. Clint took that as permission to continue.
"Most importantly she has unfinished business with Cross Technologies. I believe that they are working with Hammer Industries under the orders of the Red Room to produce the stolen Stark technology before we can make use of it. I think the Black Widow wants to make sure that doesn't happen. Her mission isn't to oversee a project for the Red Room, it's to destroy it."
"Ok," said Coulson his eyes expressing the depth of his doubt. "How did you come by this intel? Did the Black Widow volunteer it during your little heart-to-heart?"
"No," admitted Clint. "But my gut tells me it's right."
"Your gut?" Coulson restrained himself from heaving yet another long sigh. "Clint, I've never had reason to doubt your instincts before, but…"
"Then don't!" interjected Clint with vehemence. "Phil, trust me on this. I read Romanoff just like you read me all those years ago. She's desperate for a way out, I can feel it in her. There's no way what she was doing at Cross had anything to do with Red Room oversight, she was too far from the action even as Cross' PA. C'mon, you know as well as I do that if there's even a chance that I'm right she's far too valuable an asset to let slip away or to terminate on sight. Best of all she can help us with our own goal: stop Cross from utilizing stolen Stark weapons design."
"Secondary goal," put in Coulson wryly. "Our first was to neutralize the most dangerous assassin in current circulation."
"We can do both if we recruit her," shot back Clint.
"Yeah, and how did that work out for you when you proposed it to her? How's the headache?"
Clint unconsciously rubbed his head. "I'll live."
"Let's assume you're right Clint – an assumption I'm not real comfortable with right now – how are we supposed to recruit her and get the intel we need? She's off the grid, disappeared into the wind. All of our best efforts so far have given us exactly zilch."
"Just let me get back to Cross, my cover is still good. I have a feeling that we won't need to find the Black Widow, she'll find us."
Coulson stared at Clint for a beat, trying to gauge where his agent's head was at. Finally he shook his head.
"Wow, that is just such a comforting thought, Clint."
Clint was getting antsy. It had been two days and there had been no sign of the Widow. There were some murmurs in the office when Laura Matthers hadn't appeared for work, but Cross had immediately stifled them when he announced that she had called him and asked for some leave time as a family emergency had come up.
Clint looked askance at the CEO when he was told, but hadn't said anything. It was possible that Romanoff had actually called in for leave, trusting that Clint wasn't going to break her cover since it would likely jeopardize his own, but he didn't believe that she would have left even that much of a trail to be followed. He wondered why Cross was seemingly going out of his way to make excuses for an absent employee.
In the meantime he managed to make a few more connections with his own research. It had been a gamble since he'd had to directly confront some mid-level managers with some uncomfortable questions, but time was running out and he couldn't afford to pussy-foot around things any more. He was within reach of a location for the off-the-books project, he could feel it, all he needed was one final break.
Just as he was looking into some dubious delivery records to the outskirts of the city in which the mileage didn't add up Clint looked up with surprise as William Cross himself stormed into his office.
"I don't appreciate being made a fool of Mr. Benton! I don't appreciate being lied to to my face!"
The smile of greeting froze on Clint's face as he looked the industrialist in the eye and his blood went cold. Had he been made? Had the disappearance of Matthers sent Cross' natural suspicion into overdrive and cause him to look more deeply into Clint's cover?
"Sir?" he finally said, deciding to play his role until the bitter end.
"I pay you to keep me safe. I pay you to ensure my projects reach completion! I pay you to make sure no one infiltrates my organization!" screamed Cross, his voice getting louder and more shrill with each statement.
Clint merely nodded. "Yes sir."
"Then do your job!" barked Cross without any further preamble. "Someone has infiltrated my organization and they need to be dealt with. Now!"
He threw a folder onto Clint's desk and his voice suddenly became very low as he muttered with quiet menace, "Why I need to have this information provided to me by outside sources I don't know. Prove to me that you can do your job and aren't the monumental fuck-up you appear to be and you just might live to get your last paycheque."
Cross' eyes smouldered, there was no other word for it.
Clint looked down at the file and flipped it open. He saw exactly what he expected. A picture of Laura Matthers was clipped to a detailed report on the Black Widow, her known background, and her recent infiltration of Cross Technologies. It looked like the Red Room had finally caught up to their wayward asset.
Clint looked up at Cross.
"Matthers?" he said, mustering as much confusion as he could manage on his face.
A terse nod was his only reply for a moment before Cross added, "There is a facility. It's on the edge of town. We are doing a very special experiment there. Off the books. Black ops for the government and strictly need to know."
"And your head of security didn't need to know?" asked Clint with a dubious raise of his eyebrow.
"He did not. Not until I was informed by sources apparently better equipped to do his job that a supposed employee of mine was actually a terrorist planning on destroying work aimed at giving the US government a leg up on global threats."
Clint inwardly winced at the bald-faced lie, but outwardly he only nodded. Obviously Alvin Benton wasn't meant to survive long regardless of the outcome of this assignment.
"As of now you are to directly oversee the security at the facility. If she isn't there tonight she will be soon and I want her terminated with extreme prejudice. If this is not resolved satisfactorily, assuming she does not kill you herself, then they will have a very hard time identifying your body…if they ever find it. Have I made myself clear, Mr. Benton?"
Without waiting for a reply Cross turned on his heel and left the office.
Clint watched him stalk away and then sat down heavily at his desk. Well, at least now he knew where to look for her.