Vital Communication Chapter 15
Disclaimer/Author's Note: Same as Chapter 14. We're under continued trigger warnings still. Please proceed with caution.
Captain America walked into a bar, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, dressed in his newly updated Class B Captain's uniform.
The bartender immediately saluted him, welcoming him. "Captain Rogers! Wow, never thought I'd see you in my tiny place. What can I get you?" John Allen is a man of medium build, and well defined muscles. His brown hair kept in the usual 'high and tight' ubiquitous of all male military service members. He had sparkling green eyes in a face that only seemed to carry the usual worries of a business man, rather than someone who had something to hide.
"Well sir," Steve said, after returning the salute with a smile, "I came looking for a friend of mine. But I'll take a soda while we talk." He settled on a bar stool in the middle of the length of the hardwood and chrome bar and pulled off his cap to set beside his arms on the bar's top.
"A friend huh? Military or?", Allen asked, reaching for a glass to get ice and the soda gun. He put the full glass in front of Steve.
"No, not military. He met a girl here last night though," was the easy reply, as Steve sipped his drink. Allen began to fidget, trying to find things behind his bar to clean or move around.
"I don't keep track of things of that nature, Captain. My own version of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'," he laughed, shifting a few high ball glasses uneasily.
"I understand that. Your business stops with the drinks and food, not with people's personal lives. But the thing is, I have reason to believe my friend is in trouble. You know I can't just ignore a buddy in trouble," Steve explained, rolling the now half empty glass between his palms. He hinted at well known parts of his own past – the inability to leave any man of his behind being key.
"Yes sir, I get that," Allen said, still nervously shifting glassware. Fortunately for them, or for Allen in particular, the rest of the bar was empty at that time of day, being between shifts.
"So this friend of yours, what's he look like?" Allen finally asked. Steve described Bruce, down to the outfit he'd worn of a pale purple button down shirt and faded brown khakis.
"Sorry Captain, there wasn't anyone fitting that description last night."
"Now son," Steve started, "Let's try again." And he reached into a pocket of his jacket and pulled out a group of papers folded into quarters. Clint and Natasha had explained that John Allen would likely try to lie, and had provided a few printouts for Steve to use to pressure the man. Steve unfolded the pages onto the bar and turned them to face the bartender.
John Allen gulped and went pale. The top page was his most recent financials. Steve flipped it aside to show street camera stills of Bruce and Betty both outside, then turned that to show a new still of the gray van.
"Want to think about it?" Steve said, splaying the pages out, side by side on the wood grain surface of the bar. He placed his wide, strong hands flat on either side of the series of pages, as a warning. Allen looked down, not able to meet his hero's eyes.
"You have to understand, I had to do this," he said after several long minutes. "General Ross is not someone you can ignore or cross, ever. Dr Ross had me prepare special drinks for Banner. For safety, she said." Allen shook his head, "I've heard the stories. I was here during the invasion by those aliens. The Rosses need to leave well enough alone."
"Well soldier, we're going to fix that, right now," Steve said. His right hand came off the bar and dipped into a pocket. He pulled out an odd looking device, and pushed a single button to speak into it.
"Okay team, let's assemble here," he called, then released the button.
The door to the bar opened and the rest of the Avengers wandered in. Clint and Tasha moved behind the bar and Tony took up a position by the door, flipping the lock and turning off the neon OPEN sign. He was the only one not uniformed, the team was too conspicuous with the other three as it was. The armor would cause unnecessary damage to the place besides. Tony had brought a pair of Stark tablets, which he promptly put on the nearest table and commanded JARVIS's attention.
"J-man, run that forensic scanning program we wrote on the way over, see if it picks up anything on Banner," he said to his AI.
"Right away, sir" came the reduced volume reply.
Clint searched the bar, while Tasha questioned Allen. "Tell me everything about this deal, 'pigeon'," she purred, subtly moving him out of his place and over to a booth to sit. Steve gathered his papers back up, grabbed his cap and went to join Tony.
"This General Ross, who is he?" he asked the billionaire.
"Major trouble for Banner," Tony replied, "No pun intended." He grinned a shark's grin. "He is the one that wanted to recreate the super soldier for the modern era. Tapped Banner, thinking the gamma was part of it? I'm unclear on that. Or his daughter had something to do with Bruce's involvement. When the work went south, Ross suddenly had it in for our favorite rage monster."
Steve could hear anger building in Tony's voice as he described this General. "And can we do anything to stop him?" Steve then wanted to know.
"Been thinking about that for awhile now. Not sure what to do at this point. My last conversation obviously did not make much of an impact. Knew I should have made sure he was still in the bar when the bulldozers arrived," Tony growled, slapping the tabletop in frustration.
"We'll work on that when we find Bruce, I promise you," Steve swore. Bruce was his own man, and did not need someone hunting him for sport, or a misplaced sense of ownership.
Clint had disappeared into the back of the bar, and found where the bar trash had been taken to the nearby dumpster. "Hey Widow, ask our boy where the materials for the drug went," he called back to his partner.
Tasha turned to the bar owner, "You heard the man."
John Allen sighed, twiddling his fingers in a bar towel. "Under the boxes of soda syrup," he admitted. Clint found a heavy, dark plastic bag holding two canisters, a bottle of cheap vodka, and a half a bottle of tonic water. Clint dragged it out to show the others. Tasha scoffed at the choice of vodka, but otherwise made no comment. Steve and Tony took the whole bag and had a brief discussion on who'd get it back to the Tower for testing.
Tasha finished her interview with Allen. "I cannot promise there will be nothing further. But do not leave town, as they say in the police dramas," she said as she stepped away from the booth. He nodded, accepting her words as benediction.
"Captain Rogers?" he called to Steve before they left. Steve paused, but didn't look back. "For what its worth, I hope you find him."
"For your sake son, pray we do. Otherwise, well, we ARE the Avengers," and the team left the ex-soldier to ponder and pray.
Tony, once back at the Tower, quickly retreated to his lab to run chemical analyses on the materials Clint had recovered, as well as seeing what JARVIS had parsed from his scans of the bar. Tasha and Clint went over the video recording of her interview with Allen. Steve was at loose ends, not having the skills for this sort of work. Pepper watched him, then quietly whispered, "They'll need food, and probably lots of coffee to keep going until Bruce comes home. Why don't I start by ordering pizza? Go start the coffee pot, and make it strong." Steve nodded, and headed for the communal kitchen. Pepper ordered several pizzas, even knowing they wouldn't all be eaten at once. The variety of toppings was there to cover tastes she didn't know, and extra would be on hand for leftovers.
Steve ended up delivering food to each working group, including Pepper, who'd ensconced herself in the dining room to work on reports and other SI ephemera. Clint and Tasha were alternately running the video through a continuous loop, watching captions, the bar owner's facial expression and posture and making copious notes on whatever they were finding. Tony was throwing himself around his chem lab, working through multiple tests of all the evidence they'd brought back. He'd even had JARVIS run up the Tesseract hunting program to see if they could pinpoint Banner that way. But since Bruce didn't actually emit Gamma radiation outside of spilt blood, it was a horrible longshot.
Just as Steve was leaving the lab however..."Sir? The Gamma tracker has picked up a trace in the warehouse section of the Garment District. Triangulating GPS coordinates now."
"Gamma?" Steve turned to Tony.
"Yeah. Hoped I wouldn't need it though. Dammit. Let's get the spy kids and go get us a rage monster," Tony chugged the hot coffee he'd picked up, ignoring the plate of pizza slices perched in a cleaned off area of a lab table. Steve nodded and preceded him out of the lab to the elevator.
They gathered up Clint and Tasha, who'd finished dissecting the video interview. "What did you learn?" they asked each other, moving together towards the elevator to head to the garage. Clint waved Natasha to start.
*Brief Warning for Mental Torture*
"Someone, possibly her father, reprogrammed Dr. Ross's mind. Where she used to respect, and even love Bruce, now she sees him as an interesting specimen, or series of experiments. She's also got a new fixation on her father, desperately wants to please him. John Allen knew of the Rosses, but did not serve with the General. This was, he was convinced, a way to control the monster, a 'mistake of science' had created. He had been told it was a service to his country," she explained, frost lacing her voice so much the boys expected to see and feel the air around them get much colder.
"Huh, wonder what worked over the other good doctor, to make her the mad scientist?" Tony quipped.
"A host of things, Stark," Clint elected to explain, saving Tasha from dealing with more than just the old memories from the Red Room. "Pills, torture, mind control devices..." he didn't need to go on.
"JARVIS and I ran the Gamma tracker program, and," Tony sighed, scrubbing his hands through his hair in frustration.
"It was always a possibility," Tasha softly said. They all nodded, grim faced.
*Brief part over*
Down in the garage, they got into an SUV Tony owned and hardly used, and peeled out, Clint driving like a mad man. They managed the cross town traffic in an amazing ten minutes without incurring notice from the NYPD, or scaring cabbies. Tony described the building and its surrounds. Clint was happy there would be easy ways of getting the intel needed to rescue Bruce.
The warehouse was like its neighbors, a squat construct of steel and concrete that functioned in the industrial area, hidden behind the modern flash and glitz of the Garment District. They parked half a block away. Clint ran off, bow in hand, quiver thumping on his back, to find roof access to get eyes on the building. Tony grabbed out the flat packed Mark V he'd rebuilt after Monaco and found a sheltered spot to wait, impatiently, for the call on the comms. Tasha and Steve moved on foot to the building to get a closer look and be ready when Clint called.
"I'm in place," came Hawkeye's voice on the comms, "Thermal scope gives me 5 bodies, and I can't tell where Banner might be. I will need to move. Isn't there a secondary room in this place?" He got an affirmative. "All right, moving around to that side of the building." Once he had, he was able to see that Banner was indeed in the building. Bruce's body temperature ran consistently hotter than most people's, and Tony had surmised it was because of the Gamma. "Switching scopes," he told them at last, which was a signal that they were nearly ready to go.
Tony was cursing in the background, "You know I hate this damn plan. Why the hell aren't we charging in?"
"Because we know good and well that a knife to the throat is quicker than any of us," Steve barked from the shadow of the back of the building.
"Both of you, quiet," Widow snarled. She'd managed to get inside and was up in the rafters and roof trusses, and was trying to concentrate on the job before her.
While she didn't normally perform long range take downs, in this case, it would be easier, quieter. She moved along the exposed beam, quiet as a mouse, until she got to the center of the building, where she crouched in the shadows. "I'm in position. Can confirm five people minimum. Eyes on Ross, female," she reported, voice tight and clipped.
"JARVIS, put in a call to Agent Sitwell, inform him of the situation and that we're cleaning up," Tony said, activating the armor.
"Yes sir," came the tinny reply. The collapsible armor enfolded Tony and powered up. But still, he waited. He hated it, but saw the sense of it. He could not always respond as if his house was on fire to every situation. Learning team dynamics would be difficult, he knew, but worth it in the end.
"Confirm Widow's check. Cannot see Banner. Presume he's in the smaller room. Moving to target," Hawkeye came back.
"Signal when ready for go," Capt. America called. He stood by the roll up door, at ease even though in costume, he would draw attention like flies to honey. Somehow that area was devoid of other people. The circular shield hung casually from it's strap against his back, letting him present a less offensive image that could change in an instant.
Less than five minutes after Hawkeye moved his position, "Ready for go. Iron Man? Let's rock."
And the windows and doors to the warehouse exploded inwards.
Oops, I cliffed again. Sorry!