A/N1: So, timelines and pacing were major issues as I tried to write this, and then reality whapped me upside the head about the time difference between the East and West Coasts, so that was fun! In other news, I've finally managed to get an Avenger into the story. Tony is immensely fun to write.
Something was not right, here. Something was just…it was off, and if Benji just had more information he could figure out what it was. He'd gotten all of Will's files – the ones that looked useful, anyway. He didn't need after-action reports on the missions they'd run together, after all. – downloaded faster than he'd expected, and quickly disconnected from the IMF's servers. And now, poking through the file Will had labeled "Interagency Cooperation: Contacts," he knew something was wrong.
Start over. Go back to the top and look again.
Strategic Homeland Intervention and Enforcement Logistics Division (SHIELD)
Main Contact: Coulson, P.
Secondary: Sitwell, J.
In case of emergency, immediately contact Hill, M. or Fury, N. through secured line (access code clearance level 7). Further instructions relayed as necessary.
Impossible Missions Force (IMF):
Main Contact, NY Office: Kriffson, O.
Secondary, NY Office: Briesland, I.
Main Contact, Chicago: Moore, E.
Secondary, Chicago: Oland, T.
Main Contact, Miami: Alexander, H.
Secondary, Miami: Flores, W.
Main Contact, Austin: Pares, B.
Secondary, Austin: Grippen, P.
Main Contact, Seattle: Greiss, L.
Secondary, Seattle: Shimore, S.
In case of emergency, immediately contact Kriffson, O. or Greiss, L. through secured line (clearance code alpha). Further instructions relayed as necessary.
Benji stared at the screen, scrolled up and down the document again to make sure he hadn't missed something, and then stared some more.
Where are the numbers? Emails? Bloody Morse Code, something…how do you contact these people, Will? Hell, how do you contact our people if you don't have the numbers written somewhere, I don't care how good your memory is, there are too many numbers to memorize all of them.
Benji stared at the contacts for SHIELD again, brow furrowing. Who were Hill and Fury? Kriffson and Greiss ran the two IMF offices with the most traffic and they were the directors with the most seniority, so those emergency contacts made sense. In a situation that could be classified as an emergency by the IMF, you'd want someone who could pull strings and throw around resources without asking permission. But there weren't even titles attached to any of the SHIELD contacts, so all Benji had was supposition that those names followed the same basic guideline Will seemed to have followed for the IMF.
Well, to be fair, Will hadn't listed the titles for any of the IMF agents, either, but still, you would think that would be important.
Okay, so, think, Benji. Will's an agent for the IMF. And Ethan didn't know he was in Croatia until after Dubai.
No matter how good an actor Ethan was, he had always been a little off when he had to act about anything to do with Julia. Benji didn't know what they'd said to each other, after that first post-mission get-together in Seattle, but whatever it was, it had settled Will's nerves and smoothed out Ethan's edges. The two of them had already worked together easily, but it was almost scary how well they did with each other after that. Which had made that first mission as an official team a lot easier than it otherwise would have been, because having half their team dancing around each other would have been awkward.
Which means Will is a sneaky bastard, and he's not just an IMF agent, he's the liaison for SHIELD. So he's got to have picked some things up from being around them. So how would a government agent hide information on his own organizations servers?
Benji grinned, and mouthed along with Will's voice playing in his head.
"The best way to hide anything is not to put it in plain sight, but make it part of something else that is in plain sight. People look for the object as a whole, not that object as part of another whole."
Scanning through the files as a whole again, Benji started looking for something that Will could have included numbers or email addresses in, without it looking odd. Now that he had a fair idea of what he was looking for, it wasn't all that hard.
Black Market Contacts: North America
A quick click had him scrolling through information, numbers for each name and more emails than not, until he found a set of familiar initials for a contact listed under "New Mexico".
Carson, P.
The initials combined with the location of Will's last known assignment clinched it in the agent's mind. Benji let out a soft ha of accomplishment, and rolled his head side to side to stretch the cramped muscles. Then he settled in to figure out how to hack into SHIELD from the info he could get from the email of one "Mr. Carson".
Jane gratefully stretched as she exited the car, some ten hours after they had left Seattle, feeling her spine creak and hearing it crack as she did so. She and Ethan had gone over their plan at least a dozen times since they set out, covering every contingency they could think of, everything that could go wrong, and how to adapt if it did.
"Ultimately, we're not going to know exactly how we'll play this until we know how Brandt's tied into this mess. When Benji can get us that information, we'll make final plans, but for now-"
Jane sighed, rubbing at her eyes with tired hands. "We have to play it by ear."
Ethan didn't respond, but then, he didn't need to.
Eyeing the small motel they had stopped at without enthusiasm, Jane gritted her teeth and turned sharply to retrieve her bag from the trunk. She might not like the idea of stopping for the night, not when they were still so far from New York, but they needed at least a few hours of sleep, all three of them. She and Ethan would be doing the majority of the driving unless the no fly ban was lifted in the next two days – which wasn't likely – and Benji might be able to work on his end while in a moving car, but experience had taught all of them that it was easier for Benji to concentrate either in the back of one of the surveillance vans IMF provided, or in a quiet room with at least one desk to sprawl his equipment all over.
Given that they needed the information Benji was after, stopping for the night made the most sense out of any of their options. Ethan and Jane could continue making plans and back-up plans, and each catch some sleep so they could spell each other on their marathon drive cross-country and Benji could do some work not cramped into the back seat of the car and also get some shut eye.
None of that meant that being in one place for more than two hours felt like a failure to Jane. She hadn't even wondered if something was wrong when Will hadn't called her back like he'd promised to after their last conversation, with a definite time and place to meet. She had just assumed he'd been caught up in the installation he was setting up, and maybe that had been true, at the start…
But she hadn't even wondered, too used to the secrecy that her job demanded, too used to sitting on her own curiosity for her continued sanity when it came to what Will was doing without them, without backup that he trusted.
And now there was a crater in the ground in New Mexico, and her teammate might or might not be lying dead on a New York street, buried in a pile of rubble after that explosion took out his rooftop position and –
"Jane."
She jumped, slightly, turning to see Ethan watching her over the car's roof, understanding softening his sharp gaze. She nodded slightly at him, and made her way to the lobby and the front desk to secure some rooms for them while Ethan bent to pry Benji out of the car and away from his data gathering/hacking.
Jane wasn't entirely sure which he was doing right now. Benji had exclaimed triumphantly at somewhere around the two hour mark, and then proceeded to mumble to himself and the computer about sneaky bastards and won't fool me. She presumed that meant he'd managed to find a way into SHIELD's servers, but if that meant he'd actually managed it Jane didn't know.
She was fairly certain he hadn't. Benji would not be quiet after hacking the premiere spy organization in the United States. For all Jane knew, they were the best in the world. It wasn't like SHIELD went around advertising itself.
Shaking herself out of her thoughts, Jane smiled at the desk clerk. "I need two rooms for one night, please."
It was such a pain maintaining a normal appearance, but one woman rooming with two men who were obviously not her relatives would raise comment and they did not need to make it any easier for IMF to track them down and try to order them away from Will.
Ethan watched Jane march towards the front entrance of the motel and sighed. Not knowing what was going on with Brandt was tearing at his team, tearing at him, but it seemed to be wearing on Jane the most. Not having anything tangible to contribute to their efforts beyond rehashing plan after plan was making her more and more tense. They'd kept the radio tuned to a news station all throughout their drive, but had turned it down low when it became clear no new information was going to be available for a while. It was almost midnight in Montana, and it was even later on the east coast, so it wasn't as if they were really losing any time by stopping, but it felt like they were. They'd all be up and on the move again in six hours at the most, but staying in one place, staying still…it wasn't what Jane wanted to do and to be honest, Ethan didn't want to either. They had to stop, to regroup and make sure they could reach New York in any fit state to begin the search for Brandt. It was logical; the sane thing to do.
It was maddening.
Ethan shook his head sharply and opened the driver's side rear door, leaning in slightly to catch Benji's attention.
The former tech turned agent was still typing on his laptop, brows furrowed and a slightly manic light in his eyes. Ethan highly doubted that Benji had even noticed they had stopped.
"Benji."
The typing continued. Ethan felt a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
"Benji."
Still nothing. Ethan shook his head, and waited until Benji paused in his typing, probably considering his next move, and snatched the laptop away.
"HEY!"
Ethan grinned as Benji tumbled out of the car after him, glaring furiously. "What the hell, Ethan? I need that, give it back. You were the one with the brilliant idea for me to hack the Fort Knox of spies, give it back. I was onto something there-"
Ethan watched as Benji's situational awareness finally succeeded in penetrating the tech fog clouding his brain. "We're stopping for some rest. Food and sleep," he filled in before his team mate could ask. "Jane and I need to get some decent rest to make it to New York non-stop after this, and you need food and a better space to work in than the back seat of the car."
Handing the laptop back, Ethan turned to get his own bag out of the trunk, handing Benji's over when the other man came back for it, laptop already tucked away in its own special bag. Worried eyes sought out Ethan's and he met the other man's gaze head on.
"Are you sure stopping is a good idea?" Benji asked. "Time's essential right now, and I can work in the car the whole way, I don't need a stationary post to do this."
Ethan nodded. "I know. But you work better with one, or with an IMF van and all that equipment. Our plan is going to hinge on what you find out, Benji. Getting you what you need to do that, as quickly as possible, helps everyone." He shut the trunk with a slam, and let his hands rest on the lid of the trunk for just a moment, letting the tension he was trying to hold in flow through his grip into the unyielding metal. "We won't be any help to Brandt if we go off in the wrong direction because we didn't bother getting the right intel first. He'd be the first one to call us all idiots, and he'd be right." Ethan drew a deep breath and looked back up at Benji. "So, we're going to eat, and Jane and I will sleep for a few hours while you do your hacking, and then you will get some sleep while Jane and I incorporate that into our plans. We'll be on the road again in six hours, maximum. But we have to take this time, so we do this right."
Benji sighed, and nodded. "Alright, then," he conceded with an unhappy frown, but he turned to enter the motel and Ethan followed close on his heels.
"What've we got, Pep?" Tony called over his shoulder as he adjusted his tie, eyeing his reflection critically in the mirror. Ah, the wonders of makeup. You couldn't even see the gashes and bruises he'd come away with despite the suit unless you were up close and personal, which none of the press would be. "Please tell me I get to make fun of someone, today. I have been good for the last two press conferences I've been forced to attend, tell me that, I don't know, People got on the short list or something so I can mock them."
"No mocking the press, Tony. They'll just publish that, too, and it won't solve any of our problems."
Tony snorted as he finished with his tie and turned to pin the woman who was tapping away on a StarkPad by the door with a look. She hadn't even looked up as he rambled to her. She knew him far too well.
"Be honest, Pepper," he said, strolling towards her with his hands in his pockets, grin sharp and dangerous, already feeling his "meet the press" mask slipping into place. There were times he hated having grown up in the spotlight, and there were times he was almost pathetically grateful. It had at least taught him to be a great actor when there were cameras around. "We always have problems with the press, it is just a matter of scale."
Pepper's lips twitched and Tony's grin became self-satisfied and a bit softer. She looked up, blue eyes dancing. "Just try not to make more problems then." She reached out to him and adjusted the collar on his shirt. "You know they're going to ask about the others. Don't let them side-track you. Can you stick with the plan this time, please?"
Tony gave her a sheepish grin, remembering another pre-press conference meeting, and a discarded cover story. "Not just me this time, Pep. I think Romanov alone would string me up if I said anything else other than the party line."
Not that they'd gotten one beyond lay low for a while, which, really? SHIELD should know the press didn't do laying low. They were going to come up with a lot worse things than the truth if someone didn't give them something. Getting rid of Loki from Central Park had made sense. It had the space, and was not on SHIELD property, so Fury could plausibly claim he hadn't know what they were doing in time to stop them, but it had not been private in any sense of the word. Tony was fairly certain that if there weren't already YouTube videos of all of his team members – captured during the panic and chaos of yesterday's battle – then there certainly were of today's send-off. And since SHIELD didn't seem to acknowledge that the press could be a threat, it fell to Tony to do something about it.
So what else was new? He was always picking up messes of some sort. Just lately, more of them hadn't been of his own making. He wasn't sure if that was Pepper's fault, or just a result of him finally accepting responsibility for his actions.
Maybe both.
"Mr. Stark? We're ready whenever you are."
Tony looked over at the woman who had leaned into the doorway, the Stark Industries logo on her id badge catching the light. It refracted off the plastic, creating a bright, sparkling point of light for just a moment before it moved with its owner.
Massive ships, far more than they could fight, with hundreds, maybe thousands, more aliens than they could kill.
A single white point in the black, exploding into bursts of orange and red and bright, brilliant white and he was falling, but it was okay now. He'd gotten the bastards where it hurt most.
"Tony?"
Blinking, Tony looked down into Pepper's worried face and forced a smile for her. "Yeah? Did I miss anything good?"
Exasperation flirted briefly with her features before Pepper sighed. "Tony, are you sure you're up for this right now? It's barely been a day-"
"And the press gets more inventive the more time they have. We all know that, Pepper." He set his hands on her shoulders, squeezing gently. "Relief at not being dead will only last so long, and then the damage is going to really register. If we don't head them off at the pass, they're going to do worse than anyone wants to see. And I, for one, do not want to see what Fury's backup plan is for redeeming the Avengers' public image. It probably involves assassinations."
That got him a weak smile that morphed into her professional smile as she straightened, shaking off his hands. "Then let's go," she told him.
Tony caught her hand as they moved through the doors, and she squeezed as the cameras started flashing.
A/N2: So, unfortunately you guys will not get a new chapter for at least a couple weeks, because I am going on vacation this week. I'll resume replying to reviews after I get back, but I'll have little to no internet access until Friday. I love all your reviews, and I will respond to those I can, but not before the weekend.