Miami, Florida.
Hendry walked down the docks to the berth for a boat called Caspartina, where he was to meet Shaw.
He sorted through the berths, down the docks… Until he found a large yacht at the very end with the name across its' stern. The Caspartina was enormous, even for a luxury vessel.
"Colonel!" Shaw said as he walked down the gangplank to meet Hendry. "Welcome to the Caspartina! Come on up!"
Shaw escorted Hendry onto the boat, and up to the top deck, where the woman in white, and the man who'd conjured the tornado were waiting. The woman in white lounged on a deck chair in a bathing suit, reading a magazine through a pair of large sunglasses.
"Care for some more champagne, Bob?" Shaw asked as he filtered behind the bar on the deck.
"I'll pass." Hendry declared as he placed his hat upon the edge of the bar, and placed both hands in his pockets, allowing one to settle upon the fragmentation grenade he'd brought as insurance.
Shaw's brow furrowed as he leaned against the bar, and retrieved a cigar from the humidor.
"Okay, well, so much for the pleasantries." He muttered as he snipped the end off of the cigar. Shaw stuck the end in his mouth, and lit it up. "Anyway, Bob, I was wondering if you'd told anyone about our little arrangement."
Oh no, here we go. Hendry thought as he clenched the grenade in his pocket.
"Nobody."
"He's telling the truth." The woman in white said without once looking up from her magazine.
"Good." Shaw said with a smile as he puffed on his cigar. "After that confrontation with the captain and his lapdog, I was afraid we might have some kind of… Leak."
"He called Wonder Woman a whore." The woman in white said flatly, without looking up from her magazine.
Shaw's eyebrows shot up from behind his sunglasses, and he lowered the frames to peer at Hendry over the lenses.
"And he's still alive?" Shaw said, flashing a glance over at the woman in white.
"She wasn't there." She replied.
"Gotta say, Bob." Shaw said with a smirk. "You've got some balls. Not a lot of brains, but sometimes you don't need 'em."
"Can we cut to the chase, mister Shaw?" Hendry demanded as he clenched the grenade so tightly the safety handle bit into his palm.
Shaw shrugged.
"I suppose we should wrap things up, shouldn't we?" He asked rhetorically, gesturing to the man who'd conjured the tornado earlier.
The man rose from his chair, and as quickly as he could, Hendry pulled the grenade from his pocket!
"I knew better than to trust you!" Hendry said as he hovered his hands as closely as he dared, with his left hand just barely touching the grenade pin. "Now, you let me walk out of here with my money, or I will pull this pin, and we all die!"
Shaw's shoulders slumped in defeat, and his brow scrunched up behind his sunglasses in an expression of exasperated incredulity.
"Really?" Shaw asked, with nary a hint of fear in his voice as he set his glass down on the counter, and grabbed a towel. "I was willing to let you walk away with your payoff, and this is how you repay me?" He asked as strode around from behind the bar, wiping his hands with the towel. "You bring me a fucking grenade?" He said as he snapped the towel back onto the bar angrily. "Well, maybe this is a sign I should pick my business partners a little more carefully." Shaw said coldly. "Next time I'll find someone who isn't going to get into a war of words with Captain America at the Pentagon! So go ahead." Shaw said smugly. "Pull the pin."
"I will, I'll do it!" Hendry said as the sweat of his hands made the grenade slipperier and slipperier, loosening his grip on the explosive.
Shaw rolled his eyes as he removed his sunglasses, and pocketed them.
"No, you won't." He said, snatching the grenade from Hendry's sweat-soaked hands like it was a baseball. "But I will." Shaw said coldly as he pulled the pin, and allowed the safety handly to fly off into the ocean.
Hendry attempted to dive for cover in the instant before the grenade exploded, but, in his haste, he noticed that neither the man who'd summoned the storm, nor the woman in white had made any attempts to shield themselves from the blast.
And then, it exploded in a flash of white hot light, piercing sound, and shrapnel. The flash was held in Shaw's hands, the sound died out almost instantly and was replaced by a steady warbling, and the shrapnel melted into pure energy in his hands as Shaw's arms appeared to ripple and contort in the heat, appearing almost as if he had multiple arms… But neither his hands, nor his clothes, appeared to burn.
Hendry looked up at Shaw's face, and found a look of manic pleasure had crossed the man's features as the light the explosion had produced glowed in his eyes like they were portals to the very depths of hell itself. Impossibly, Shaw's features seemed to grow sharper, his wrinkles softer, his skin tauter, and his hair darker as the light faded…
And then, the energy winked out of existence as the last of it flowed into Shaw's hands.
"You…" Hendry panted, panicked. "You're one of them?!"
"Very astute of you, Colonel Hendry!" Shaw said as he clapped his hands together and rubbed them gleefully. "Care to take a guess what I can do?"
"Yo- you…" Hendry stammered. "You absorb energy!"
Shaw flashed Hendry a cheshire grin, and nodded.
"It's what keeps me young!" Shaw exclaimed as he stalked closer to Hendry. "I've been around for nearly five-hundred years, and let me tell you… Most of it has been exceptionally boring! I was born too late to see the age of mutants in Egypt, too late to see the age of heroes in Greece and Rome, but just in time to see tiny little wars all over the world that rarely amounted to anything." He shot Hendry another psychotic smile. "But that's been changing this century. New kinds of technology, new kinds of wars, new kinds of mutants! Especially in the last few years since Truman dropped those bombs! And even before then, we had a nice little crop popping up. Times are changing, Colonel, and much like Homo sapiens replaced Homo neanderthalensis, so too, will Homo superior replace Homo sapiens."
Shaw cackled as he backed Hendry up against the railing of the boat.
"But, staying young isn't the only perk of my powers." Shaw whispered. "Let me show you the fun part!"
He tapped Hendry on the shoulder, and the Colonel's uniform collar began to glow like the surface of the sun. Hendry tried to pull off his jacket, to back away, but the glow spread across his body and killed his scream of agony as every nerve in his body activated at once before it could be more than a squeak in his throat. Hendry tumbled off the back of the Caspartina as the light ate him alive, and he exploded in a shower of dust before he hit the water's surface.
Shaw gazed down at the water's surface satisfactorily.
"That may have taken more energy than he gave me," He said. "But now, we don't have to clean up the mess!"