A/N: So it turns out I actually had too much material left for one chapter...so you're all getting two. The next chapter will be the last. :D Many thanks to VleRoux, red_b_rackham, and Shazrolane of The Beta Branch for helping me whip this into shape.

That Radium Glow

Chapter 14

"Well," Rogers said, "we have something Loki wants."

My coffee cup jittered in my hand. It wasn't hard to follow Rogers' thinking. Confronting Loki on our own was one brand of foolish, but throwing Bruce Banner into the mix as bait was entirely something else.

"So let me get this straight," I said with more than a little disbelief, "you us want to walk into this guy's house and hand over a nuclear scientist to a known spy?"

Captain America shrugged and casually drained his cup of coffee. "I guess I do."

"Rogers," I said politely. "Have you lost your mind?"

"Do you have a better idea?" he retorted. He leaned over to set the empty mug in the kitchen sink. "I don't like it any more than you do, Barton. It's a risk, but it gets us close to Loki without arousing suspicion."

"Without arousing suspicion?" I exclaimed. After our previous encounters, driving a Sherman tank up Samson's front lawn would be more subtle. "You really think he'll just believe we want to give Banner back?"

Rogers shrugged again. "Sure, if we do it right." I raised a skeptical eyebrow at him and he sighed. "Look, guys like Loki want to believe that we're stupid. He wants to believe that he's tricked us. He isn't content with being the smartest guy in the room; he has to prove it." He made a little open gesture with his hands. "So we let him. We give him what he wants."

If that was what this Loki guy needed to feel smart, all he really needed to do was have a quick word with my ex-wife, I thought sourly. Still, Rogers' observations jived with my memories of the last conversation I'd had with Dr. Leonard Samson, particularly the cold glee he'd exhibited while neatly outmaneuvering my questions. I rubbed my chin thoughtfully and took another swallow of coffee. "And then we arrest the son-bitch."

Rogers nodded with satisfaction. "Exactly."

"Might work," I conceded grudgingly. I swirled the dregs of coffee in the bottom of my cup. A few grounds had escaped the filter and I glowered at this affront to my coffee-making technique. "It's still a hell of a risk, though, Rogers," I observed. "And it seems to me it ain't just us taking that risk."

We both looked out into the living room again. As if on cue, Bruce Banner stirred slightly on the sofa. His eyelids twitched and he let out a low, pained groan. He was finally coming out of it, and Rogers and I needed to make a decision. I bit my thumbnail. There weren't really options to weigh. Rogers' plan was half-baked at best, but I didn't have a better idea. We couldn't chance Samson getting away.

I picked up a cup of coffee and walked out to crouch beside Banner. "Rise and shine, Doc," I said loudly, waving the steaming cup under his nose. I tapped his face a couple times with my free hand. Rogers loomed over my shoulder, partly out of curiosity, partly for dramatic effect.

Banner's dark eyes opened slowly. He blinked several times and reached up to feel his jaw with a wince. His handcuffs glittered dully in the dim morning light. "You…have one heck …of a right hook, Agent Rogers," he mumbled.

I could sympathize. I chuckled and glanced up at Rogers. He half-smiled. "Well, you didn't give me a lot of choice, Dr. Banner."

Banner grimaced again. "Sorry," he apologized. He levered himself into a sitting position with his bound hands and looked warily between me and Rogers. "Are you going to take me back?"

"That depends," Rogers said sternly, folding his arms across his chest.

Banner glanced at me pleadingly and I shrugged. I shoved the coffee cup into his hands and took a seat beside him on the sofa. Rogers dragged my old chair closer and straddled it the same way I had.

"On what exactly?" Banner asked. His knuckles were white with tension around his coffee cup, and the note of fear in his voice cut straight to my heart. I bit my tongue. We needed answers first.

"What can you tell us about Samson, Dr. Banner?" I asked, watching him closely. "And why are you so afraid of him?"

His hands shook when I mentioned Samson's name. A little hot coffee slopped over the brim of the mug and trickled down his hand. Banner flinched and hastily set it to one side. His eyes roved desperately towards the telephone.

"T-Tony is going to wonder what's keeping me," Banner tried. "I was supposed to-"

I glanced at Rogers, who got up and yanked the telephone wire out of the socket in the wall. Banner gulped, his dark eyes wide. "He can wait," Rogers said coolly.

"You told me Samson wasn't what he said he was," I prompted Banner. "Care to explain?"

Banner's hands worked nervously together in his lap. I was amazed he still had skin on his knuckles given how often I'd seen him do it. "He, uh, knows things," he started reluctantly. I lifted my eyebrows at him and he continued, hunching miserably into himself. "Things he shouldn't. Things no, um, civilian should know. About what I did in the war."

"Well, it's a good thing we're not civilians," Rogers said lightly. Banner made a valiant attempt at a smile, but it came across as more of a wince.

"We know what you did in the war, Banner," I reassured him. "We talked to Stark."

Banner leaned on his elbows, tiredly scrubbing his hands across his face. "You know, I don't even think he's a doctor," he said, peering up at us with a humorless little chuckle. "The way he talked, the way he acted…it just wasn't right."

I held my breath. Rogers opened his mouth and I held up a warning finger for silence. Banner was on the edge of cracking now; one wrong word might clam him up again and nobody wanted that. Not when we were so close to finally putting all the pieces of this damned case together.

"I don't remember the first few days," Banner started quietly. He glanced up quickly from the floor. "I guess I was too drugged. Everything is hazy after that. I, uh, remember you, Agent Barton. You came to see me."

I hid behind my neutral lawman expression, though my heart sang at the prospect of getting answers. "I did," I confirmed. "Twice. You wouldn't remember the second time."

Banner looked away again, his cheeks hot with shame. "I…I don't know when I realized he was pumping me for information. Samson, I mean. It was gradual at first, I think. It's hard to remember." He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, running his thumb over his knuckles over and over. "I do remember always feeling worse after I'd talked to him, after the injections," he added methodically. "I had this nagging feeling that something was wrong. That somehow I'd done something I wasn't supposed to do."

"Like beating up four cops?" Rogers asked. I shot him my steely glare in lieu of sinking an elbow into his ribs. He shrugged innocently.

Mercifully, Banner didn't seem bothered by the barbed words. He shook his head. "No, it wasn't as…primal as that. It was like I'd made a promise and forgotten it." He reached for his mug of coffee and raised it carefully to his lips with both hands. "Anyway, after a while I started to feel better. It's hard to say how long that took; there weren't any windows in my, uh, cell and I was drugged all the time. But I started to notice things anyway."

"Like what?" Rogers asked, his eyes narrowing.

"How Samson always listened to his staff," Banner said with a shrug. "He never did anything for himself; he always took their suggestions. That's, uh, odd for a doctor."

Rogers and I exchanged a look. Not so odd for a spy masquerading as a doctor, though. "What else?" I asked.

Banner thought for a moment. "Uh, the way he asked me questions, asking simple things and then segueing into something different," he said slowly. "Oddly specific things about my work. Something about, I don't know, yields. Or physics. Physics no medical doctor would know."

"Yields?" I asked blankly.

"Bomb yields," Banner said grimly, and a chill went down my spine. A few feet away, Rogers sat up very straight. He started to ask a question but Banner cut him off. "Look, you have to understand it's all very fragmental. The only thing I knew at the time was that it felt wrong. It was almost instinctual. I just knew I had to get out of there." He sighed and tried to brush the hair out of his eyes with his bound hands. "I, uh, didn't finish putting all the pieces together until later, with Tony. When we realized what Samson had been doing all along, I had to tell someone." He looked at me with some emotion I couldn't name. It still made my stomach twist uncomfortably. "You, Agent Barton. You believed me before. I'd hoped you'd believe me again."

Rogers frowned and finally asked what we had both been wondering for the better part of the night. "But why didn't you just telephone?"

"I didn't think you'd take me seriously if I did," Banner admitted. "If I risked coming back, at least you'd know I meant it."

"Well, you certainly got my attention," I said with a smile, remembering the shock of finding him on my doorstep with a gun in my face. It was much funnier now that I had the gun and Banner was in handcuffs, though I wasn't sure I'd ever live down having to be rescued by Captain America in my own living room.

Banner cringed. "Sorry," he apologized. He rubbed his hands across his face again, but he couldn't scrub away his pained expression. "I hate to ask…but were you telling the truth, earlier, Agent Barton?" he asked hesitantly. "When you said I didn't murder that poor girl?"

My smile slipped off my lips and dripped down onto my shoes. Back to business. I glanced at Rogers for confirmation. He nodded slightly and I stated: "I was. And you didn't."

"You were framed, Dr. Banner," Rogers added coolly. "By a spy calling himself Loki. You know him as Dr. Leonard Samson."

The blood drained from Banner's face. "What?"

"You were drugged the night of Stark's party," I explained. "Loki followed you from the party to the Black Widow Bar. We think you were drugged sometime around then, which is why you can't remember what happened."

Banner gaped at us, his throat bobbing though he seemed unable to find his voice. "The point is," Rogers continued, "there's no way you would have been able to kill Miss Green in such a state. She died from a precise stab through her neck."

Banner looked at me, fearful and uncertain, and suddenly I realized that deep down, he really believed he had murdered Doreen Green. A stab of hate for Samson lanced through my heart. Hell, Samson had the Chicago police, Rogers, and almost myself convinced Banner had killed her for a while. It was somehow worse that he had convinced Banner himself so thoroughly.

"You couldn't have done it, Bruce," I reassured him. "Trust me. It wasn't you."

My words finally seemed to dissipate whatever lingering doubts Banner still had. "Oh god," he mumbled, slumping forward into his bound hands. His back shuddered several times, and I couldn't tell if he was relieved or buckling under the weight of his heavy conscience or even both. My heart twisted again and I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder until he could pull himself together. I knew too well what it was like to feel responsible for another's death. Rogers glanced away.

"She died to frame…me?" Banner asked after a moment, finding his voice again. Confused pain and disbelief cracked his words. "Why?"

"Loki needed to make you look insane," Rogers explained. His voice was methodical, cool even, but I could see sympathy in his eyes. "To get you out from under the eye of the government. To get you somewhere he could question you without interference. The drug he gave you causes intense hallucinations. For all intents and purposes, the person it's administered to seems insane."

"Hallucinations?" Banner's eyes roved uncomprehendingly between us. "Drugs? But I don't…"

"The pills," I told him quietly. "The iodine pills. Someone switched them. They're activated by alcohol, like that drink I gave you-"

"At the police station," Banner finished. "I thought was losing my mind. I saw things… so that's what happened to those policemen. My god." Understanding suddenly dawned on his blanched face. "So…so the hospital? All those times? That-that was all just Samson? He was dosing me?" Banner cried, his voice breaking. "I thought I was losing my mind and it was him the whole time?"

"We think so," I confirmed.

Banner shuddered again and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, as though he might be sick. I felt a flash of jungle heat, a dead weight across my knees and sticky red liquid soaking my clothes. Given Banner's history, it didn't take much imagination to guess what he'd seen under the influence of Samson's drugs, over and over and over again. Vitriol for Samson and what he had done burned through me again. I gritted my teeth. I could hate him all I wanted, after we'd brought him in. Until then I had to keep a clear head.

"That poor girl," Banner repeated hollowly. "That poor, poor girl."

Rogers shot me a look and I took a deep breath. If I'd read Banner right, and I was reasonably confident that I had, it was brutal but necessary to drop it all on him at once. He'd had his moment to reel.

"She's not the only one, Banner," I said. "There were three. Three that we know about, anyway."

"What?" he exclaimed.

"Henry Pym is dead," Rogers told him. "They found him last week."

"I heard," Banner said sadly. "Tony told me."

"Well, Stark doesn't have all the details," I said. "Local cops pulled him out of Lake Mead." I leaned forward a little for emphasis, making sure to meet his gaze. "He'd been in the water a good long while, but he didn't drown. He was killed, Banner. By a single stab through the neck."

Banner froze, his eyes wide with shock and horror. He swallowed nervously. "Loki."

"He's targeting scientists, Dr. Banner," Rogers said evenly. "Particularly scientists associated with you."

Banner's eyes narrowed in thought. He was as sharp as Stark said; it only took him a moment to make the leap to Richards. I tried not to think about how long it had taken me and Rogers to make the connection ourselves. "But Reed," he started. The compulsion to understand outweighed the grief in his voice. "But Reed died of-"

"Reed Richards died of a morphine overdose," Rogers interrupted. "Not cancer. Officially they ruled it suicide, but we think he was murdered, Dr. Banner. Murdered by Loki."

"Three people are dead, Banner," I said quietly. "Please, help us understand why."

At last, Banner caved. "How much did Tony tell you?" he asked, resigned. "About what we did in the war?"

"Not much," I said with a shrug. "Something about building a bigger bomb."

"That's about the gist of it," Banner said. He reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose tiredly. "Essentially, our design used a conventional fission bomb to induce the fusion of hydrogen-"

"English, Doc," I said gently.

Banner took a deep breath. "It uses an A-bomb to trigger a secondary explosion. A much bigger explosion."

"Uses an A-bomb?" I said incredulously.

"How much bigger, Doctor?" Rogers cut in.

Banner hesitated. He looked away and kneaded his hands miserably. "A…couple hundred times Hiroshima."

"A couple hundred?" Rogers exclaimed, and Banner flinched at the revulsion in his voice.

An explosion hundreds of times larger than the one that had wiped out Hiroshima. It was incomprehensible, it was sick, it was wrong...and if we didn't move soon, it might be in the hands of a hostile government. "Jesus," I swore.

"It was Hank's idea," Banner confessed plaintively. His voice was almost a wail. "He used to call it Ultra-Fission, Ultron. He came up with the initial design. Reed and I did the math. He worked on the first stage; I did the second. Tony refined Hank's designs and our calculations into something that could actually be built." He studied his hands ruefully, unwilling or unable to meet anyone's eyes. "But it was never supposed to be built. We…we just wanted to see if we could."

Even geniuses could be heart-wrenchingly naïve. I had a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach. "And can it?" I asked.

"The design was, is, viable," Banner admitted. "It can be built."

Rogers' eyes narrowed. "What exactly are you saying, Dr. Banner?" he asked.

Banner looked up. "Without me, everything else Sams-Loki has is dangerous, but not catastrophic. The Russians already have the fission bomb," he explained. "But with me, with everything that I know, he could build an Ultron bomb."

"And you don't know how much he got," I observed. Banner shook his head.

I shot Rogers a questioning look and he shrugged. After Banner's revelations, it seemed our scheme was even riskier than we'd thought. If Loki didn't have anything, we'd be delivering Banner right into his hands. But if he already had the Ultron plans…well, how would we ever know unless we nabbed him?

"We're telling you all of this, Dr. Banner," Rogers said, "because we need your help to bring Loki in."

Banner looked up. "Anything," he said with quiet resolve. "What can I do?"

Rogers and I exchanged another look. Somehow I didn't think he'd be quite so keen when he heard our harebrained plan. "You see, Banner," I said, taking over. It would probably be better coming from me. "This Loki guy spooks easily. It'll be hard for us to get close to him in person. We'll need a good reason. A really good reason."

Banner shot me a quizzical look. I lifted my eyebrows significantly at him in reply. He started upright, his shaggy curls flying as he looked frantically between me and Rogers. "Oh no," he protested. "Oh no. No. Anything but that. I can't-I won't-"

"You weren't supposed to get away," I interrupted. I hated myself a little for invoking his dead friends, but that wouldn't stop me doing it. "He had the same fate in mind for you, Banner. He was going to squeeze you for every drop of information that he could, and dispose of you when he was done. Just like Richards. Just like Pym. And if he gets away today, how long do you think it will last before he comes after you again? How long do you think it will be before he finds another way to get to you?"

Banner took a deep breath. It hadn't taken him long to connect my final statement with Elizabeth Ross. "All right," he agreed, looking up with his soft dark eyes. There was a thread of steel in his voice that had not been there before, though his thumb traced over his knuckles anxiously. "I'll do it."

Rogers made the fateful call. Banner and I watched him dial the operator and ask for the number written on the back of Samson's card. It felt like he'd given it to us a lifetime ago. My cigarettes and I had taken up residence at the table, with my lighter and an ashtray within easy reach. Banner paced back and forth, unable to keep still, alternating between worrying his knuckles and rubbing at the chafed patched of skin around his newly-freed wrists.

"Dr. Samson?" Rogers said innocently. He wagged his eyebrows at me and I rolled my eyes. Apparently Loki wasn't the only guy who enjoyed putting one over on someone. "Hi, it's Agent Steven Rogers." He paused for a moment. "Well, I'm calling because we found something that, uh, belongs to you."

Rogers paused, listening to whatever Loki/Samson had to say. "Yes, we picked him up late last night. Funny how things work out, isn't it?" he said earnestly, his eyes twinkling merrily at me. He was baiting Samson now, and doing it well. "Look, I know this is unusual, but he's, um, proving sort of a handful. Is there any chance you might be able to take him off our hands?"

The weirdest part about watching Captain America lie through his teeth, I decided, was that he was actually good at it. He had a knack for seasoning the lie with just enough truth to make it plausible. So much for that squeaky-clean Boy Scout image.

Honestly, I thought Rogers seemed a little too calm about the whole thing, considering the high stakes. I snuck a glance at Banner. He still looked pale but there was an air of grim determination about him I recognized from the jungles of Guadalcanal and Saipan. Well, good for them. I lit another cigarette to hide my nerves and tried not to think about what Coulson would do to us if Rogers and I botched this.

"I didn't want to take him back to the hospital, there's an awful lot of cameras around," Rogers said and I nodded a little with satisfaction. It was a plausible concern, especially for a spy. "The fire, you know? It's a security risk if his story gets out. National security, if you catch my meaning."

Now he was setting the hook, and setting it masterfully. I took a very long drag on my cigarette. Banner paused. Tense silence fell for a few heartbeats.

"Great, can you give me the address?" Rogers said at last, snapping his fingers at me to bring him a pen and paper. I resisted the urge to let out a low whistle of relief and scrabbled around for an old envelope and a worn stub of a pencil. I craned my neck to read upside-down as Rogers wrote. It was an Edgewater address, just like the telephone number. "Thanks, Doctor. We'll be there as soon as we can."

Rogers hung up, his satisfied expression at successfully duping Samson slowly fading when he saw Banner's tense face. "You know where this is?" he asked me.

"More or less," I replied. I compulsively checked my pistol in its shoulder holster and tugged my jacket back in place. Banner swallowed nervously; wringing his hands with such force I imagined I could hear the bones shifting. "Remind me never to play poker with you, Rogers," I quipped, trying to lighten the mood a little.

"I don't play poker," Rogers retorted with a grin. He shrugged into his own holster and pulled on his jacket, clearly pleased to finally be taking action. "I'm lousy at lying to my friends."

It was still early enough that Lake Shore Drive was nearly empty, and we skimmed the edge of Lake Michigan unhindered by traffic. Rogers rode shotgun beside me, while Banner hunkered down with the bottles in the backseat, his hat pulled low and his collar pulled high to hide his face. Nobody spoke.

I looked out over the lacy whitecaps on the lake, whipped up by that ever-present breeze that gave the Windy City her nickname. For a moment I was back in the amtrac looking over the smoking jungle hellscape of Saipan, surrounded by the rumble of the engines and the stoic silence of men on the edge of battle. The only thing missing was the salt spray and the hollow thud of waves against the hull. I snuck a glance at Rogers and saw he wore that same distant expression. I wondered if he could see Omaha in the drab sands of Montrose beach, pillboxes in the vendors' stalls boarded up for the season, foxholes nestled between hollows of undulating sand.

We turned inland and lakefront mansions and the sunny Edgewater Hotel gave way to quiet tree-lined streets and row houses. The address Rogers had given me was off Magnolia. It was a decent part of town; just nice enough to make me want to slink back to the familiar grime of the Loop. By day it would be full of children on roller skates and breaking the neighbors' windows with stray baseballs. By night it would be quiet, filled with the glow of lamps behind curtains and shadows too clean for the likes of me.

Banner popped up in the backseat, looking around with curiosity as we pulled up outside of the indicated house. "It looks so…normal," he observed while we piled out of the car. "So ordinary."

It was. The address Samson provided was a simple, two-story brick job exactly like every other house on the block. A narrow path paved with flagstones cut through a strip of lawn. Six or seven steps led up to a wooden door set with a few panes of cut glass. Windows overlooked the street, but all the curtains were drawn. The little hairs began to prickle on the back of my neck. There was no indication, at least from the outside, that a spy and a murderer lived inside.

"You remember what to do?" I hissed in Banner's ear. Rogers stood behind me, using his comparative bulk to block the view of us from the house while I re-shackled Banner's hands.

"As soon as I'm alone, call the number you gave me from the telephone," Banner said promptly. I could feel him shaking with fear but his voice was strong. "Make sure to ask for Coulson, tell them it's you, and make sure to say 'shots fired', even if I don't hear any shots."

"And if you can't find the phone?" I murmured, pressing the handcuff key into his sweaty palm.

"I come out to the car and use the radio," Banner replied. He cast a quick wary glance over his shoulder at the looming house. "And say the same thing."

I slipped the automatic he'd borrowed from Stark into the pocket of his overcoat. Banner looked up at me sharply and I said: "Just in case things go sour."

"Barton and I can take care of ourselves," Rogers added in an undertone. "Just concentrate on calling the cavalry, okay?"

"Are you sure you want me to do this?" Banner started, his nerves beginning to get the better of him again. "I'm- I'm just a scientist, I'm not qualified-"

"We went over this, Doctor," Rogers reminded him. "We can't risk calling in until we have a gun on Samson. We don't know who might be listening, remember?"

Banner shot me an uncertain look and I clapped him on the shoulder encouragingly. "If you can build an A-bomb, Banner, you can handle this," I said with more confidence than I felt. "Let's go."

Rogers led the way with his usual self-assured stride while I hauled Banner along by his shoulder. He hung his head under his hat and dragged his feet reluctantly along the flags. I had to shove him up the stairs behind Rogers, and I wondered how much of his reluctance was actually an act. Probably not much. Banner tensed under my fingers as Rogers reached for the doorbell. I sucked in a deep breath to quell my own nerves. Showtime.

The door opened the instant Roger depressed the button. Samson, or rather, Loki, beamed at us from the threshold. He wore a silky housecoat of darkest green over an undershirt and trousers, though his black hair was combed neatly back from his forehead with the assistance of pomade. Cool green eyes roved appraisingly over each of us before settling on Bruce Banner. His toothy smile became downright predatory.

"Agents," Loki said slowly, as though he savored the word. His cold English drawl was thick with oil and a touch of triumph that made my skin crawl. He moved to hold the door open and gestured us inside. "Do come in."