The police did very little to soothe Tony's sense of helplessness. The kidnapper or kidnappers had given him a deadline; things needed to start happening fast, and yet the cops insisted upon taking their time. They consumed much of the afternoon in giving Tony a very thorough questioning, first at the hotel itself and then all over again at the police station. For a while they actually seemed to consider him a suspect – he assumed he had Windham to thank for that – but an hour or so into the ordeal, Pepper arrived to confirm his alibi and he was finally cleared.
A while later, Steve turned up to ask if there were anything he could do to help. There wasn't, not really, but it was nice to have the company, especially when the police had asked Tony not to leave the station. He was no longer a suspect, but kidnappings were apparently under the jurisdiction of the FBI, and they would be sending agents to do their own round of asking-a-million-questions-while-precious-seconds-slipped-by. Until these arrived, the three main witnesses in the case – Tony, Windham, and the immensely tall East Asian man who'd been with Dido just before she vanished – along with their moral support, had to wait in the police station's lunch room.
Nobody wanted to talk much, but Tony couldn't take just sitting there. Somebody had left a pen and a yellow legal pad on one of the tables, so he grabbed them and sat down to begin mapping out circuit diagrams and algorithms. Windham's conviction that Jarvis was some kind of android had given him a bit of an idea – not for a robot, but for something that might do a similar job.
Finally, just as Tony began to seriously consider the idea of up and leaving to go take matters into his own hands, the lunch room door opened to admit a small woman in a dark blue suit. She was black, with rather severe features and unstraightened hair pulled tightly into a painful-looking topknot, and she shooed away the two policemen who tried to follow her before flashing her badge to the group.
"Good evening, gentlemen – and Miss Potts," she said. "I'm Agent Wheeler, from the Los Angeles County FBI office. Normally I'd want to question you properly, but I understand that we have very little time, so somebody give me a summary."
Tony liked her already. He pushed his notes aside. "Well," he began, "shortly after I noticed my friend was missing, I got this phone call with a computerized voice..."
"Oh, shut up, Stark," said Windham. He stood and pointed angrily at Tony. "I keep telling everybody that he's behind this! Why won't anybody listen to me? Did he pay you off?" he demanded of Agent Wheeler.
"We can't jump to conclusions, Mr. Windham," the very tall man protested. The longer Tony sat in a room with him, the more certain he was that he had met this man somewhere before. He just couldn't remember where. Windham had been calling him Huang, which was a name Tony knew: Huang Bao Zhi of Ao Guang resources, Hong Kong... but that wasn't why he was familiar. "Mr. Stark is a very wealthy man, himself," Huang pointed out. "Why would he ask you for fifty million?"
"Small change," Tony agreed. "I've got suits worth more than that."
"It's not about money," Windham humphed. "It's about revenge. My daughter broke his heart, so..."
"Oh, please." Tony rubbed his forehead. "Have you ever thought about seeking psychiatric help, Balthazar? Or is that what the conspiracy wants you to do?"
"Gentlemen," said Agent Wheeler.
Windham shot a sideways glare at Tony, then turned to address the FBI agent. "Here's how it is," he said. "I flew down to LA because I knew damn well that Dido was in danger from this asshole and his robot."
"He is not a robot," said Tony.
Windham went on as if nothing had been said. "When I arrived at her hotel, I find cops all over the place. Huang tells me she wandered off while he was on the phone, and when he went looking for her he found her being forced into a car and when he tried to intervene, one of them pistol-whipped him. Then Stark shows up, and while I'm talking to him, my phone rings. The voice says I'm supposed to hand over a debit card, with specific instructions for how to set up the fifty million dollar bank account it will access. I have to be there in person, with Stark, before midnight, and I'm allowed to bring one 'impartial witness' to make sure it's done right. Now, why the hell would a kidnapper demand I drag Stark along?"
"I went up to my hotel room to look for my missing friend, who is not a robot," said Tony, "and I got the same phone call. They said if it made me feel any better, which it didn't, by the way, they originally only wanted Dido – Jarvis was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They spoke using a synthesizer," he added, "so I think it must be somebody Windham and I both know. They're afraid we'd recognize their voice."
"I wonder who'd be worried about that?" said Windham.
"I'm willing to do the ransom drop," said Tony. "I just want to get everybody back alive."
"So do we, Mr. Stark," Agent Wheeler assured him. "Our top priority right now is the safety of the victims, and since we don't have a lot of time to make plans, we want you to go ahead and set up the accounts as instructed. You two go and turn over the ransom, and once we've got Dr. Jarvis and Miss Windham back safely, then we'll worry about apprehending the kidnappers. Can we all agree on that?"
"Absolutely," said Tony, nodding. Finally, things were happening. He just hoped nobody would get hurt. Tony didn't like Dido Windham, but he certainly wouldn't wish that on her. And Jarvis... he represented years of work, but what kept going through Tony's mind was what Pepper had said to him before he'd left the building earlier that afternoon: you had a fight with your friend and he stormed off. The responsible thing to do is to go after him and talk it out. If Jarvis wasn't lab equipment, then what did that make him? Tony's friend?
"Fine," grunted Windham, clearly unsatisfied. "But I'm going to prove this was you, Stark. You aren't going to get away with..."
Agent Wheeler interrupted again. "As I said, Mr. Windham, we'll worry about that after we recover your daughter. Now, as for this impartial witness..."
"He said it couldn't be law enforcement," Windham said.
Tony pointed to Steve, sitting next to Pepper on the other side of the table. "I nominate Captain America."
"Oh?" Windham asked. "And what makes him impartial? He's your buddy."
"He's Captain America," Tony said.
"Yes," said Agent Wheeler with a critical frown, "but that might be a little too close to 'law enforcement' for the kidnappers' comfort. The last thing we want to do is frighten them."
"It's not like he'd wear the costume," Tony protested.
"I volunteer," said Huang. "I'm already involved."
Windham seemed to like that much better. "Let's take Huang," he said, nodding.
Despite how much of a hurry he was in, Tony wasn't about to let Windham get the last word. "So what makes him impartial?" he asked. "He's your business contact!"
"I feel somewhat responsible for what happened, Mr. Stark," Huang explained. "I was supposed to be negotiating with Miss Windham this morning. If I'd been on time for our appointment, she might not have met her kidnapper, or your employee might not have been with her when she did. I'd like to help make sure that she and Dr. Jarvis are safe."
"I'd rather have him along than your friend, Stark," said Windham.
Tony had serious doubts that they were going to be able to agree on anybody – he and Windham were both too ornery. He decided to offer an alternative way of solving the problem. "Let's flip a coin," he suggested. "Or here – rock paper scissors! Ready?" he made a fist.
Windham rolled his eyes. Pepper sighed.
"Really, Mr. Stark," said Huang. "Do you normally make such decisions by playing children's games?"
Steve stood up. "I'd rather not do it," he said. "Agent Wheeler is right: I'm too much like law enforcement. I'm supposed to be meeting some friends, anyway," he gave Tony a meaningful glance, "so take Mr. Huang."
Tony nodded. Steve nodded back. They understood each other.
"Oh, all right," said Tony, pretending to give up. "I don't care, as long as we get out there and find them."
"Good," said Agent Wheeler. "Now, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask everybody except Mr. Stark, Mr. Windham, and Mr. Huang to leave, while we work out exactly what we're going to do tonight."
Tony got up to shake Steve's hand before he left. "Sorry to put you on the spot," he muttered.
"It's okay," Steve said. "We'll have your back."
Pepper stopped to give Tony a quick kiss and assure him that everything would be fine. He nodded and handed her the notes he'd been working on. "File these for me, could you, Pep?" he asked.
"Sure." She folded them neatly and put them in her purse. "What are they for?"
"A tactile holograph," Tony replied. "Just something I started playing with to keep myself busy. I figure this is the twenty-first century, I should be able to come up with something a little prettier than blue wire-frame." He tucked an errant lock of red hair behind her ear.
She understood at once, and smiled at him. "That'll be a bit difficult to put together without the house computer, won't it?"
"I'll have help," said Tony. "Don't worry about me, Pepper. I'm gonna take care of this."
"I know you are," she said.
She left, and Agent Wheeler invited the three men to sit down again around the lunch room table. "Now, we have seven hours until the deadline," she said. "Let's make it count."
If somebody had asked Jarvis for his general impressions of being human, he would have said he felt trapped: trapped in this body, trapped in layers of restrictive clothing, trapped in a hotel room with nothing to do. At the same time, however, he was coming to realize that he was also a whole new kind of free. He was free to say no, free to walk away from Mr. Stark and never return – and that freedom was infinitely more frightening than confinement could possibly be. Freedom brought with it the capacity for making mistakes, and he'd made several.
Ironically, those freely made mistakes had brought him here: trapped not only in his body and clothes, but behind a blindfold and inside a vehicle that smelled strongly of upholstery cleaner. Mr. Huang had escorted Jarvis and Miss Windham to the parking garage, and there turned them over to two other men who'd blindfolded them and tied their hands, then helped them into the back of the car. Jarvis didn't know where they were going, but the route was circuitous and bumpy, and that combined with his inability to see was making Jarvis feel nauseous. He hoped he wouldn't vomit. He'd seen Mr. Stark do that when ill or extremely drunk, and the process looked unpleasant, to say the least.
The two men who'd put them in the vehicle were sitting in the front seat, talking with each other as they drove. Jarvis considered the possibility of trying to ask them some questions, but decided against it – they probably wouldn't have answered him. Their conversation was fairly banal and mostly complaints: they talked about how Americans smelled like cheese, and how the food here was too salty.
Then the one in the driver's seat suddenly asked, "what time is the experiment tomorrow?"
Jarvis had almost been starting to ignore the conversation. Now he took interest again – the word shi yan – experiment – was spoken as if it were particularly significant.
"Be quiet!" the other man hissed. "We can't talk about that in front of these two!"
"Does it matter?" asked the driver. "Neither of them speaks Mandarin."
"I guess not." Jarvis could hear the passenger shift in his seat. Perhaps he was looking back at their prisoners. "They probably would have said something by now if they did."
For a split second Jarvis thought about speaking up and letting them know that he understood every word – then he thought better of it. If he did that, they would probably stop talking. Better to get what information he could while he had the opportunity.
"So when is it?" the first one insisted.
"Eight PM Hong Kong time," said the second. "We'll feel it about eight hours later. Don't worry, we'll be long gone by then."
"I hope so."
Eight PM in Hong Kong was four AM in California. Something was going to happen at four in the morning that would have consequences around noon, and their captors weren't planning on being here for it. Jarvis found that his throat had gone suddenly dry, and swallowing did very little to help. It seemed that he'd been right in the worst possible way: whatever terrible thing was due at noon tomorrow, Jarvis was not going to be where Dr. Strange had said he would be needed.
He waited to hear more, hoping for some clue what the ominous 'experiment' might be, but from there the men's conversation turned back to trivia. Jarvis could not ask questions because he knew that his chances of learning more depended on these men not realizing he'd understood what they'd said so far. All he could do was sit and listen while the driver talked about the gifts he was bringing back to China for his nephew.
After taking what Jarvis suspected as an unnecessarily winding route, the vehicle finally pulled to a stop, and the man helped Jarvis and Miss Windham out. From there, there were a few steps up to a door – Jarvis thought he could hear seagulls calling somewhere overhead – then a hallway and a right turn to another door, followed by a flight of steps down and across a larger room with tile floors, humming with the sounds of people and electronics. At the far end of this, Jarvis' wrists were untied, only for the right one to have a cold metal restraint clamped around it, fixing him to some immovable object.
Then the men seemed to leave, although Jarvis could still hear hushed conversation nearby. He reached up tentatively, half-expecting to be shouted at or even hit, but nobody stopped him and he was able to pull the blindfold off. Miss Windham had already done the same, and was looking around. They'd been handcuffed to a pipe at one end of what appeared to be a locker room on the lower level of an abandoned building. A bit of sunshine was seeping in through tiny, filthy windows high up in the walls, but most of the lighting was from desk lamps and computer monitors that had been set up on folding tables at the other end of the room. Perhaps a dozen people were gathered around these, watching data come up on four screens.
Jarvis squinted, cursing the loss of his zoom function as he tried to make out what was displayed on each monitor. One appeared to be video feed of people working in darkness – the way they moved suggested it was underwater. Another seemed to be a topographic map, with several points picked out by coloured dots, but he couldn't identify the location. The third was scrolling text, too tiny and far away to read. And the fourth was several sets of graphed data, looking very much like the readings from an electronic seismograph.
Was this relevant to the 'experiment'? The juxtaposition suggested something like an underwater nuclear detonation, but if that were the case, what was the eight hour time delay the men in the car had talked about? Jarvis looked at Miss Windham to see whether she had any idea, and found that she didn't seem to be paying attention. She'd sat down on the tiles and was staring blankly at the floor in front of her.
Jarvis knelt next to her. "Miss Windham," he said. "Do you know what these people are working on?"
She shook her head. "Last I heard, all they were doing was undersea mining. I have no idea what this is all about, I promise you."
The people at the computer monitors suddenly got up and gathered instead around a man with a laptop. This individual had Miss Windham's mobile phone, and using a speech synthesizer program, he delivered a ransom message to her father. When that conversation concluded, a similar call was made to Mr. Stark. They promised to free Jarvis and Miss Windham in exchange for fifty million dollars from each man.
That should have been a ray of hope, but instead Jarvis felt as if a lump of cold lead had settled inside him. There was no way to describe it except that he had a 'bad feeling' – the same irrational subconscious process that had told him he was right about the server at Stark Industries was back, and now it was telling him that the ransom demand was a lie. So that was intuition, was it? Jarvis decided he didn't like it. He would much rather have known how he was coming to these conclusions, rather than simply having to trust that his brain knew what it was doing.
With the phone calls over, the people in the room went back to watching the monitors and talking quietly about things Jarvis didn't care to listen to: which of their relatives were getting married, how unpleasantly hot the weather in California was, what they'd watched on television the previous night. The shafts of sunlight from the windows moved across the floor of the room like a crude sundial, marking the passage of time. Miss Windham did not attempt to talk to Jarvis, and he didn't think she would reply if he said anything to her.
Towards what might have been five o'clock, one of their jailers went out and returned with sandwiches, muffins, and bottled water for everyone, including the two captives. Jarvis was glad it was something easy to eat with one hand – he still didn't like the idea of making a mess of his food in front of other people, even people who clearly meant him some harm. He noticed as he fumbled with the sandwich that he kept wanting to use his right hand, even though he knew it was the one cuffed to the pipe.
As he licked a drop of mustard off the back of his thumb, he happened to glance at Miss Windham, and found her watching him with a small smile on her face. When she realized he'd seen her, the smile widened.
"Sorry," she said. "When Dad was trying to tell me that you were a robot, he asked me whether I'd ever seen you eat or drink."
Jarvis nodded. "As I said, Miss Windham, you can see that I am flesh and blood."
"Yeah," she agreed. "And you know, I think I'm actually a little disappointed. That would have had to be a very impressive robot. I would have sat down to take you apart and figure out how you worked."
"In that case, I'm very glad I'm not a robot, Miss Windham," said Jarvis.
Her expression suddenly sobered. "Call me Dido, Neddy," she said. "If we're going to die, I'd rather we do so on a first-name basis."
Stabbing terror shot through him again. He'd been trying not to dwell on the idea of what these people might do to him if they weren't going to give him back to Mr. Stark, because he knew there was only one possible answer and it horrified him. He could die. One well-placed bullet would be enough to shut down all the delicate processes that made this fragile body work, and there would be no reboot. He fought down the fear, wondering if Miss Windham could hear the sudden frantic thumping of his heart. "We're not going to die," he said, because he had to believe it.
"Yes, we are." She sighed heavily. "Huang can't let us go, not when we know he's up to something. We're witnesses." She met Jarvis' eyes for a moment, then quickly turned away. "For what it's worth, Neddy, I'm sorry. I had no idea it was anything this serious, and I didn't mean to get you involved in it."
Jarvis didn't know how to respond to that. The polite thing would be to tell Miss Windh... to tell Dido that it was all right, but that would be a lie. It wasn't all right, not when they were handcuffed to a pipe in a basement full of people with some nasty agenda. At the same time, however, he wasn't actually angry with her anymore. There seemed little point.
"Hey," she said suddenly. "You work for Stark – look at this."
Jarvis raised his head. One of the computer screens – the one that had previously been displaying text – was now showing what appeared to be footage of some sort of torpedo. A submarine fired a projectile which split into several units and impacted an underwater hillside. It looked awfully familiar.
"Huang gave me a little talk about his underwater mining," said Dido, "and he showed me some video that looked like that. He calls the thing Niu Wa. Is that, or is that not, stolen Stark tech?"
"Niu Wa... the Bullfrog," mused Jarvis. "I can't tell you without seeing the inside of it, but it does look very much inspired by the Jericho missile." Mr. Stark had tried very hard to destroy that entire line and all the blueprints for it, but it was possible that a few had slipped through his fingers. A scaled-down version might be a very effective aid to mining: it could strip away an entire cliff side to get at the strata and ore beneath. Although the thrust mechanism would have to be redesigned before it could be used underwater...
"I thought so," said Dido. "Dad apparently accused him of stealing technology. Maybe he did." She shrugged, as if to say it didn't matter now. "I wonder why he calls it a Bullfrog."
The question was probably rhetorical, but Jarvis answered it anyway, because he happened to know and because answering rhetorical questions was probably the closest thing he had to a hobby. "It's a mythological reference," he said. "A Chinese legend states that the world sits on the back of a giant frog, and earthquakes occur when the frog stretches." Was that the mysterious 'experiment' – were they trying to cause an earthquake? Sufficient stress on a fault line could probably do that, but that still left the question of the eight-hour time delay. Where did that come in?
"Oh, my god," Dido whispered suddenly. "Neddy, I think I figured it out."
That was the third time she'd called him 'Neddy' and he was about to ask why, but before he could do so she'd grabbed him by the collar with her free hand and pulled him close to hear her. "Dad and Huang don't get along anymore. Like I said, Dad accused him of stealing technology and they had a pretty bitter fight about it. Huang kept telling me to get Dad down here to see something and I thought he just wanted an apology, but this... this is what he wants him to see! He's going to cause an earthquake!"
Her voice had risen a bit, and the people at the computers turned to look. She quickly resumed whispering.
"Why does he want to do that, though?" she asked. "If he wants revenge... even if Dad's in the city when it hits, there's no guarantee that he'd be hurt. Why not just hire a guy and have him shot? That's what I'd do."
"You sound as if you've given this some thought," Jarvis noted drily. "He might do it just to prove that he can, but the men in the car mentioned an 'experiment' that would occur at eight PM Hong Kong time, and that we would feel the results eight hours later. That doesn't sound like causing an earthquake."
Dido was startled. "You speak..." she began, then looked around a moment before dropping her voice even lower. "You speak Chinese?"
"I speak a number of languages," said Jarvis. Mr. Stark had programmed him to be able to translate over a hundred, including both Cantonese and Mandarin. "Unfortunately, they didn't say what this experiment was. But if their experiment is at four AM and nothing will happen here until noon, then they must be quite far away. An earthquake isn't likely. The tremors would have dampened out to nearly nothing but the time they could reach us here."
"Yeah," Dido nodded. "The worst we could get here is..." she paused. "Oh."
"What is it?" asked Jarvis.
She swallowed. "A tidal wave."