2: Are you ready to comply?

Chapter 2

Nat's POV

I was sat in the conference room staring at the news on the screen. The French Secretary of State murdered, but the worst part was he was shot through his daughter, who also didn't make it. There were no clues, or possible leads. But this wasn't the first assassination recently of people in high positions. He was adding to what was becoming a fairly large list. Whatever was going on, it didn't look good.

"There is no way this is a coincidence anymore. Celebrities, prime ministers, Princes, Secretaries are all being assassinated. There has to be a link. There has to be a reason. All executed in public, in the open. Whilst the method is the same, there's no order to the madness of it all" Fury said, his hands curled into fists. He was stressed. To be honest we all were, we were pushing ourselves into missions and recons to distract us. Some would say we are experiencing a burn out, but as The Avengers, rest was a luxury we could not afford. Especially not when there was an organisation, or assassin going around killing people in power.

"I found something" Tony said bursting into the room. He wasn't around much anymore, but my guess is Fury had called him in to look into whatever was going on.

"A link I mean" he stuttered, pressing on his phone and suddenly the screen in front of us was covered in information. I tried to decipher it, but that was like trying to decipher Tony's brain, ie impossible.

"What are we supposed to be looking at Mr Stark?" Fury said, walking round the table so he could analyse the screen better.

Tony played around with the tabs on the screen to show bank statements, each belonging to one of the many victims. All of them had received 5 million dollars weeks before their deaths, okay this was a link, a motive. But the account numbers were different? It wasn't sent form the same person? Unless they had multiple different accounts, but that would be too suspicious surely, opening so many accounts?

Tony watched me, he could see my thought process, as I scrolled through the information he had sent through to my own tablet in front of me "you're right Miss Rushman" I rolled my eyes at the nickname "I had the same question, same amount of money, totally different addresses. All owned by different people, different banks, in different countries. So I dug further, into each alias used to open the accounts. All created in the same day. However that wasn't the key to cracking this, rather this was" he said throwing up a picture on the screen, and my eyes widened. "One of the individuals you caught a week ago with HYDRA, his face is all over one of the accounts". So this was HYDRA. This whole thing. Part of me was relieved, I liked going on their missions now, getting to kill them, or bring them in. I would never get closure fully, but putting a bullet in their eye socket helps me sleep better.

"My guess is that the money was part of some deal that went wrong, or backfired. HYDRA wasn't happy, so they eliminated them" Fury spoke up after carefully analysing the notes. "We need to get into everyone's bank accounts and see who else has been given that amount of money from an unusual account, then we will have an idea of who will be attacked next" Fury said, analysing the map on the table of the victims countries, locations and points of death, there wasn't an obvious pattern to follow, so following the money was our best shot at stopping them.

"One step ahead of you. The last recipient, one Angela Merkel" Tony said, putting the information on our screens. Now this really made no sense?

"HYDRA want to kill the Chancellor of Germany?" I asked, trying to hide my confusion.

"Firstly she is a women, HYDRA were never happy about her being brought into power. Secondly whilst HYDRA once was focused on Germany, it is now an authoritarian paramilitary-subversive organization bent on world domination. Germany was only the beginning of HYDRA, it's much more then just one country now" Tony said, I saw Steve look down, he went into the ice so HYDRA would be destroyed, he lost his entire life to end it all, and he died for nothing. I knew how much it hurt him.