Peggy did not sleep at all that night. Her face still stung, and she had to lie flat on her back so the burned skin wouldn't touch the pillows. Worse than that, her brain simply refused to calm down. She turned the afternoon's conversation over and over in her head, trying to figure out where she'd lost control of it.

In the end, she had to conclude that she'd never had it. Lake had been in charge from the moment she'd said I want to talk to Agent Carter. And the bloody coordinates… Lake must have known that Peggy was dying to ask her about those. She'd been laughing behind her mask the entire time.

Had Peggy learned anything, or had everything Lake told her been a story? Did the Soviets want Dottie back, or did they want her dead? Did they care about Fenhoff? Did they care about Zola, or did Lake simply not want to admit that she'd gotten the wrong room? The longer she thought about it, the angrier Peggy became. She hated being manipulated, and the woman who called herself Kay Lake was a wizardess.

And once again, there were the coordinates. Peggy was supposed to think they were the wreck of the Valkyrie. There was no other reason to draw the shield on them. If Lake had come to America to capture Dottie and kill Zola, whether for her own reasons or somebody else's, why would she make a detour to drop that envelope in Peggy's purse? It couldn't be a bargaining chip – now that Peggy had it, she could simply check for herself. Was it a distraction? Bait? A piece of psychological warfare designed to drive her mad?

Even knowing that whatever she was told would be a lie, it was terribly tempting to go back and ask Lake about them, just to find out what the woman would say. Her explanation of why her masters wanted Dottie but not Fenhoff seemed believable enough. What reason could she possibly give for the coordinates?

Eventually, well after midnight, she sat up, turned on the lights, and went to get dressed. Peggy had no doubt that going back would be playing into Lake's hands again, but at least this time she'd be wary. Maybe, if she kept her head, she could learn something.

The men at the police station were surprised to see Peggy again, but she showed her badge and they let her inside. She descended the stairs, and asked the man standing guard outside Lake's cell to step out for a moment. It all gave her a terrible sense of déjà vu. This was exactly what had led up to facilitating Dottie's escape, wasn't it? Except this time it was going to be different, she told herself. This time, she had no use for the woman behind those bars outside of idle curiosity. Once she'd established to her own satisfaction that she wouldn't be able to get any answers, Peggy could go back to her hotel and maybe even sleep for once.

Lake was lying on the cot with no blanket over her, curled up and facing away from the bars. Her back was moving gently as she breathed. The shackles were lying in a heap on the floor. It was probably wiser to leave them rather than to take the risk of entering the room, but they did draw Peggy's attention to the fact that Lake was not attached to the bed.

Evident had suggested that the girls training in Siberia were always handcuffed to their beds at night. Similar marks on the bedposts had appeared in every room they knew Dottie to have stayed in. Peggy had spoken to a psychologist about this, and he had agreed with her initial hunch that the handcuffs represented a perverse form of security. If the girls' keepers shackled them to their beds, it meant they weren't expecting to up stakes and flee in the middle of the night. With the cuffs on, any surprises would be real surprises, not sudden training exercises.

Lake had shown that she could get out of the cuffs easily, so the fact that she hadn't put them back on suggested she was expecting something to drag her out of bed that night. Something that would happen so quickly, she might not have time to bother about handcuffs. If she thought that something would be Peggy letting her out, she was going to be sorely disappointed.

"Miss Lake," said Peggy, rapping on the bars.

Lake rolled over and sat up in one smooth motion. "Yes?"

At least it was good to know this woman hadn't been sleeping like a baby while Peggy herself lay staring at the ceiling. She stepped back out of arm's reach. "Was anything you told me this afternoon true?"

"Truth is a matter of circumstance," said Lake.

"No it isn't," Peggy said. "When I say…" she thought for a moment, and chose a random moment in British history. "When I say William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus , that's true . It happened."

"He said it happened," Lake countered. "You've only got his word for it. Maybe his sister discovered it, and he took the credit."

"Details," said Peggy, although she had to admit some indignation on behalf of Caroline Herschel.

"The devil's in the details, Peggy," said Lake.

"I know." She nodded. "Now… perhaps you can give me some details about this ." Peggy held up the sheet of paper, still covered with fingerprint powder, but with the numbers and the drawing still clearly visible. "Those are your fingerprints. You put this in my purse. That happened, no alternative scenarios possible. What is this?"

Lake looked as if she were considering several possible answers, and Peggy thought that if she said it was a piece of paper she would reach through the bars and strangle the woman.

"It's where the Valkyrie crashed," said Lake. "You already figured that out."

"Why did you give it to me?" asked Peggy.

"Because I wanted you to have it," was the reply.

"Why?"

"Because I think that's what Captain America would have wanted."

She was probably right – he would have. It was a short list of people Steve would have trusted to memorialize him without trying to make use of his earthly remains, but Peggy's was one of the few names on it. Of course, so was Howard Stark's, and that hadn't turned out so well. For a moment Peggy wondered how Lake could have known what Steve wanted… but then she remembered the films. Everybody who'd seen those knew that Steve carried a picture of Peggy in his compass. Once Lake had determined that she was a real person and not an actress, it would have been an easy conclusion to come to.

"How do you know that's where he is?" Peggy asked.

"Because I've been there," said Lake. "I've seen it." She got to her feet. "The Valkyrie came down with a list to port. The wing on that side hit the ice, broke through it, and tore off." She used her hands to suggest the motion. "The fuselage rotated away, crashing through the ice as it went, until the starboard wing got caught on the rocks at the edge of an island and stopped it. The cockpit filled with water immediately and the windows popped out, forcing the pilot out of his seat and out of the craft. His body settled back on top of it as the water froze again."

"He wasn't wearing his harness," said Peggy. Of course he wasn't, the bloody fool. He never did.

"He's lying on top of the plane," Lake said, "with his eyes shut, like he's sleeping. He must have been knocked unconscious immediately. I don't think he felt a moment's pain. His shield is on one arm," she assumed the same position, "and a fist in the other, as if he'd clutching something."

The compass . Lake's descriptions were so vivid, Peggy could almost see the crash happening in slow motion in front of her eyes. She wanted to believe it had happened that way. The devil was giving her the details with a smile on his face.

"Who knows about this?" Peggy asked.

"I do," said Lake. "And you do."

"Who else?"

Lake shrugged. "The Inuit who live around there probably know. They'd have seen it come down and they might have investigated, but I doubt they'd disturb it once they realized he was dead. The ice would protect him from wolves or bears, and as long as a corpse isn't going to be scavenged, they're not worried about it."

Peggy nodded slowly. It was all so plausible, and yet the only way to find out if any of this were true would be to travel fifteen hundred miles ad look for herself. How convenient. "Let me guess," she said. "If I let you out of this cell, you'll take me there."

"You don't need me for that," said Lake. "You have the information you need."

"So I go by myself… and leave you here unsupervised?"
"I'm in jail. What can I get up to?" Lake's face was the picture of innocence.

"Miss Lake, the more you imply that you want me to go elsewhere, the more certain I become that I need to stay right here," Peggy told her.

"That's up to you. But be careful what you do with that page," Lake said, nodding towards the paper. "It's not that hard to figure out what it means, and there are people who would kill for it. And I old you twice now, call me Kay."

As Peggy walked back to her hotel in the darkness she murmured the numbers on the page to herself over and over. Seventy-four. Forty-seven. Thirty-five. Ninety-five. Twenty-five. Three . She repeated them until she was absolutely sure she could never forget them, that she'd be reciting them under her breath on her deathbed if she lived to be a hundred. When she arrived, she burned the page and flushed the ashes down the loo.

Then she climbed back into bed and shut her eyes, and realized that she did actually feel sleepier now. She had, perhaps, an inkling of what Lake might actually be trying to accomplish: she wanted to ruin Peggy's reputation, and possibly the entire SSR's. She wanted them to mount a very expensive expedition to the arctic and come back with nothing, having wasted valuable time and taxpayer money on a tip they knew wasn't trustworthy. They would look like fools, and people like Vernon Masters would turn it into a public scandal and shut them down.

That fate was easy enough to avoid, though – all Peggy had to do was never tell another person about it, ever. She'd already told Agent Russel, but he hadn't seemed very interested at the time and by now he'd probably forgotten all about it. As long as Peggy didn't remind him, it ought to be fine… or perhaps she could have a word with him about it, just in case. Surely of all people, an FBI agent could keep a secret.

Nothing in Peggy's world was ever that simple, of course, but this was early days. There was still a time to keep a lid on this if she played it right.

Between her bout of insomnia and her late-night interrogation session, Peggy slept late again, though not so late as the previous day. It was around ten-thirty when she woke up, and the first thing she noticed to her great relief was that her face was finally starting to feel better. When she looked in the bathroom mirror, she found that the redness had faded, though she was still quite puffy. Washing stung, but it wasn't the agony it had been before. She almost looked like a human being again.

"Seventy-four," she said to the mirror. "Forty-seven. Thirty-five. Ninety-five. Twenty-five. Three." The numbers must be a red herring, but Peggy didn't want to forget them. Just in case.

She still didn't wear makeup, but she stood a little taller as she walked to the SSR, and the sun wasn't as painful today. A couple of the ladies on the switchboards said good morning to her and mentioned that she looked much better. Peggy thanked them, and took the elevator up to the SSR.

There was a nasty shock waiting for her there.

A large table had been placed in the centre of the room. There were papers strewn over it and coffee mugs and half-eaten pastries around the edges, but most of it was taken up by a large map of the United States with a series of pins in it. Peggy had a similar one in her apartment in Los Angeles, charting Dottie's known movements. This one had more pins – and standing at the head of the table, talking to Thompson, was Kay Lake.

She was no longer in her gray prisoner's uniform. Instead, she was wearing a white jacket with black polka-dots and a black skirt with white ones. Her hair was done, and she was wearing makeup and gloves. The women's straw hat hanging off the corner of one of the chairs must also be hers. She looked up as Peggy walked in, and smiled.

"Good morning, Peggy! You look better today!" she said.

"Good morning, Kay," Peggy replied.

"Morning, Marge," said Thompson.

Peggy took a moment to picture herself standing alone in the bombed-out ruins of Coventry Cathedral, screaming at the top of her lungs. Once she had at least imagined indulging that urge, she opened her eyes and said, "Jack, may I have a word."

"No," he said. "I took your recommendations into account and came to a decision. I think you're letting a personal feeling of rivalry with these women cloud your judgment, and I want to remind you that you don't even work for the east coast office anymore."

"I see," said Peggy stiffly.

Thompson looked around. "Would you excuse us a moment, gentlemen?" he asked. "And Kay?"

Various heads nodded. Lake flashed a dazzling smile and said, "of course, Jack."

"Thank you. Carter?" Thompson waved for her to follow him. Peggy did so, but she was seething . Everything he'd just said and done had been designed to humiliate her: refusing to talk on her terms, dismissing her concerns, accusing her of being overly emotional, and then forcing her to talk privately on his schedule. He'd better have something to say for himself, or she was going to head straight back to California. There was probably nothing Thompson himself would like better.

Thompson shut the office door and then turned to face her. "I know you think I don't know what I'm doing, but I do. Before she left that cell we got prints and mug shots, and those are on their way right now to every border crossing, air- and seaport in the country. If this goes wrong, she'll have nowhere to run, and she knows it."

"Does she," said Peggy. She left the question mark off on purpose.

"These girls' whole schtick is we're supposed to underestimate them," Thompson said. "We think they can't be that dangerous because they're women. So turn that around on her. I've got two CIA guys in that room undercover and there's another pair of them watching from a car across the road. If she moves we'll be ready, and until then, she thinks her feminine wiles have worked."

"So all that outside was for her benefit," Peggy asked suspiciously. It would certainly be enough to convince most people that Jack Thompson didn't care what a woman thought.

"Yes," said Thompson. "Now, if you don't want to help, I'll call Daniel and you can go back to Los Angeles. If you do, your job is to hang around and question everything I say so I can tell you not to be paranoid."

"Business as usual, then," Peggy remarked. She glanced through the window to the main room. Agent Russel was there, standing against the wall with his arms folded over his chest, looking like he wanted no part of this fiasco. Lake was laughing at something one of the other men had said, for all the world having a marvelous time.

"I'm not going to stay just so you can pretend to bully me," she decided. "I will call Daniel myself."

Peggy's talk with Daniel was very brief. "It's me," she said. "I'm coming back."

"You are?" He was surprised. "What about Underwood?"

"Thompson seems to believe he has everything well in hand. He certainly no longer needs me around to be somebody who 'thinks like these Russian girls'." She held the receiver away from her mouth as she heaved a frustrated sigh, not wanting to subject Daniel's ears to the roar. "This is going to blow up in his face and I want to be as far away as possible when it happens, so that nobody can claim it was my fault. You don't happen to have anything that needs investigating in Australia, do you?"

"No," said Daniel. "The platypus is very strange, but scientists assure me it evolved on this planet."

It wasn't much of a joke, but jokes were not Daniel's forte, and Peggy chuckled appreciatively regardless. "I have such a story to tell you, darling," she said.

"Maybe you can tell it over dinner," he suggested. "It's been a while since we did anything outside of work. We've both been busy with the Underwood case, and now that it's out of our hands, maybe we can relax a bit."

Peggy's first reaction would have been to say that she was tired and annoyed and not looking her best, and to request that they put it off until later… but Daniel was right, it had been a long time. Peggy was not very good at 'dating'. She hadn't really done it since Fred. She and Steve had never bothered dating – they had worked together, enjoying each other's company in that context until they came to an agreement that they wanted to continue doing so for the rest of their lives. It had been the same with Daniel. The ordinary sort of courting rituals were a bit of an afterthought. Maybe it was time she tried again.

"Dinner sounds lovely," she said. "But nowhere fancy, please. My face is still a bit of a mess and I don't want to have to dress up."

"Just good ordinary American food, I promise," Daniel told her. "Tomorrow night?"

"It's a date."

Before she went to the airport, Peggy did try to drop in at the Automat to let Angie know she had to leave again, but unfortunately her friend was not on shift. One of the other waitresses, an older lady called Pearl, promised to pass on the message.

By the time she finally got off the final leg of the flight in Los Angeles, it was very late, and All Peggy wanted to do was take a long, hot bath and collapse into bed. She decided to forgo the former in order to give her skin one more day, but she did manage to put off the latter until she'd at least changed into her nightclothes.

In the morning she did feel very much better, and sine it was three hours earlier on the west coast, she even managed to wake up at a reasonable hour. When she washed her face it only stung a little, and by the time of her dinner date with Daniel, Peggy was well on her way to feeling herself again. As he'd promised, they didn't go anywhere formal, just hamburgers and chips in the front seat of his car.

"You said you had a story to tell me," Daniel said.

"Mmm," Peggy agreed, her mouth full of strawberry milkshake. "Do I ever! I assume Thompson gave you at least some details of what happened at Sing Sing."

"Only the bare bones."

"Right." She dipped a chip in mayonnaise. "Well, two men and myself sat guard outside Fenhoff's cell half the night, only to hear a fuss at the room next door. They determined the next day that she'd augured through the window and shot him with a bloody crossbow, of all things, and then she attacked me with a spray made out of kitchen spices."

"That sounds like something you'd come up with," Daniel observed with a smile.

"I am a bit hacked off she thought of it first," Peggy said. She went on to tell him how Lake had been taken into custody more or less by accident, and the embarrassing interview that had followed. Then she told him something else.

"I went back in the middle of the night. When Lake came to see me here, pretending to be Agent Russel, she left a letter in my purse. I got fingerprints off it to compared to the ones we found in her room at the Botticelli Gardens, so I know it was her. It had six numbers and a drawing." Peggy grabbed a napkin and wrote them out, with the doodle of the shield below them, and showed it to Daniel.

"Does that mean what I think it means?" he asked.

"It can hardly mean anything else, can it? But it does – I spoke to her about it." Peggy crumpled the napkin and stuffed it in her purse to destroy later. "She said she'd been there, and she described the crash and the wreckage, and what we would see if we found him. I know it's a trick of some sort," she added. "I asked her why she was telling me this and she insisted it was out of the goodness of her heart, which obviously isn't suspicious at all … but she wouldn't make it sound suspicious unless she wanted it to, and so…" she shrugged. "I haven't the foggiest idea what to make of it all."

Daniel nodded slowly. "And now it's going to haunt you."

"It already is."

"Peg." He reached for her hand. "I know you're still in love with him…"

She shook her head and pulled away. "Don't start, Daniel. I've told you before, it's not a competition. Steve will always have a place in my heart but he's dead, and I love you. I'm not 'settling' for you, and I'm not…"

"Peg," he repeated, holding up a hand. "I'm not trying to compete with him. I'm just saying…"

"Sometimes I wonder if I even do remember him," Peggy said, "or whether I've just overlaid him with some childish fantasy. A man who isn't there can be anything I want him to be."

"I'm not trying to compete with him, I know I can't do that," Daniel told her, "but I also can't ask you to forget him, and I know you won't feel like you've done right by him until you've made every attempt you can to bring him home."

Peggy hung her head. She knew that was where he'd been going, and she'd been hoping if she pretended it was about something else, he'd give it up. She should have known better. "I'm sorry," she sighed. "Every so often I tell myself I have forgotten, I tell myself I'm over it, and then something happens like this, or like that bloody vial, and I find myself thinking…" She reached up to scrub traitorous tears out of the corners of her eyes, grateful she hadn't worn makeup. "Was there something I could have said or done to change his mind? It's not that I didn't try, but he didn't need to die like that! Life could have gone on. Even if it wasn't life with me, he gave so much, and he deserved so much more…"

Daniel wordlessly handed her a handkerchief. She blew her nose.

"So it's… it's not so much that I'm still in love with him," Peggy managed – though she'd have been lying if she said she wasn't. "It's just that I listened to a good man die, and there was nothing I could do about it. So I stood there at the Stork Club wearing that red dress he liked, and hoping for a miracle but feeling like a fool. And of course, he never came."

Daniel reached for her hand again, and this time she let him take it. "I think a lot of us were hoping for a miracle," he said. "Captain Rogers had been missing before and he'd reappeared, so it didn't seem possible that this was really it. I always promised myself I'd find a way to thank him properly for saving my life, and then I never got the chance."

Peggy didn't trust her voice not to break if she tried to speak again, so she just nodded miserably.

"If I do want to repay him," Daniel added, "I can think of worse ways to do it than by bringing his body back."

She looked up sharply. "Daniel…"
"It's a trick, I know, you said it's a trick." He held up a hand. "And I know you think the best thing to do is leave it alone, even if that's not what you want to do, but now that we have this information, I don't think we can ignore it. Our job is to defend the security of this country, and if there's a possibility the Soviets know where Captain America is and we don't, that securityis at risk."

Peggy shook her head. "If they know, they already have him. They wouldn't risk letting that leak to us."

"Then we need to determine that," said Daniel. "And honestly? If we don't do something…"

"… it'll eat at us the rest of our lives," she finished for him, wiping her nose again. "I wish I hadn't told you."

"No, I'm glad you did." He paused. "You didn't tell Thompson, did you?"

"Of course not!"

"Okay, good."

Peggy went on. "The problem is, I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Lake wants: it'll drive us batty until we go and check, and when we do there'll be nothing there. We'll have wasted the government's time and money, and there are important people who won't like that."

"So we'd need to secure private funding, then," said Daniel thoughtfully.

Peggy's eyes narrowed – she knew what that meant. It was hardly an unreasonable idea. Howard had already spent months of his own time searching for Steve, and he still occasionally revisited the quest with new ideas and technologies. He certainly had the money. There was just one problem. "If you think I'm going to let Stark go about this unsupervised then you're mad, Daniel Sousa – and you and I both know that I am out of vacation time!"

"You still have sick days," he said.

"I'm not sick."

"You were injured in the line of duty."

Peggy shook her head. "Oh, for heaven's sake!"

"You were attacked with a chemical weapon…"

"It was essence of paprika, Daniel, I will live!"

"… with a chemical weapon ," he went on in mock outrage, "and Thompson didn't even offer you time off to recover! I am going to insist that you take at least two weeks, to make sure there are no long-term side effects. Imagine what that stuff might have done to your lungs."

"You're hopeless!" Peggy informed him, but it was difficult to sound angry when she was actually so relieved. She knew she would be bitterly disappointed when she got there and found nothing but ice and ocean and perhaps a stray polar bear, but at least she would know. "So… if we find the crash site, we take the credit, whereas if we don't, Stark takes the blame? That's very underhanded. Have you ever considered going into politics?" Her joking had just the narrowest edge of hysteria on it, but if that were what kept her from lapsing back into tears, so be it.

"Wow," he said. "That may be the cruelest thing you ever said to me."

"You deserve it for taking me from tears to laughter and nearly back again in a single dinner!" Peggy waved a chip at him. "I'll call on Stark in the morning. Heaven knows, if he somehow finds out about it through some other channel, I won't have to worry about whether I can sleep at night anymore. He'll never give me a moment's peace again as long as we both live."

"Just tell him to keep it on the down-low," Daniel said. "You don't need a bunch of press following you. And we definitely don't want Lake knowing we fell for it."

"Don't worry about Stark, he's as subtle as an angry hippopotamus," Peggy snorted. "And as for Lake… something tells me she already knows."

That night, Peggy decided to try that bath she'd been wanting, and found it not too terrible. She felt an odd mix of dread and elation, a weight off one shoulder but a new and worse one on the other. Dottie really was still her responsibility but she was so fed up with the affair that if Thompson wanted the case, he could bloody well have it. When Lake vanished with half the classified documents at the SSR office, Peggy would be there to tell him she'd told him so.

As for the coordinates…

No matter how much Peggy wanted to hope they might find him at last, in her heart she was sure that whatever was at that point in the arctic, it wouldn't be the mortal remains of Captain Steve Rogers. The question was what she would find instead. The best possible outcome was probably nothing. The worst was… something Peggy probably wouldn't be able to think of and therefore could not prepare for.

She would just have to rise to the occasion. Fortunately, Peggy was good at that.