New Year's Day

Chapter 10

March 15th, 2015

"Ultron killed Strucker," said Steve. He was standing opposite me across the conference room table holding a small tablet.

It had only been a few hours since Ultron had attacked and fled with the scepter, but time was working against us. Though normal protocols might suggest meeting to come up with a plan, we didn't have that luxury. Instead, we worked all night, analyzing surveillance footage, news reports, and eyewitness accounts to figure out where Ultron might have gone. No detail was unimportant and every second counted. White boards were filled with notes, ideas, and any relevant information anyone could think of that might serve as a clue. When white boards were filled, windows, notepads, and blank walls became the canvas for our frantic thoughts.

"What?" I returned, walking over from where I'd been writing on the window and extending my hand to take the device from him. On it was a picture of Strucker in a jail cell, dead. He was slumped over on his small prison cot with a single bullet wound in his chest. On the grim concrete wall behind him was one word, painted in his blood. Peace.

"Damn, he even did a Banksy at the crime scene," Tony joked, leaning over my shoulder to peer at the screen, "just for us."

I rolled my eyes and gave the tablet to him, slapping it against his chest instead of placing it in his hands. We had spent countless missions hunting Strucker down. Clint had almost died just so we could bring him in safely for questioning. And Tony was cracking jokes as usual. He shot me a look and set it down on the center of the table for everyone else to examine. Nat rotated it to face where she was sitting in front of a computer, staring at the scene for a long moment while she examined it.

"Why do this? Ultron knows he has our attention, so why send a message when you've just given a speech?" she pondered.

Bruce turned around, he'd been writing something on the wall at the front of the room. "Strucker must have known something that Ultron wanted us to miss."

"I bet he..." Nat paused, typing on the computer and searching through our online files. "Yeah, everything we had on Strucker is gone. Ultron must have erased all of it."

"Not all of it," Tony mumbled.

Tony took us down to a storage room filled with stacks upon stacks of cardboard boxes, all brimming with old SHIELD files. We'd gotten to work sorting through them immediately, and the next half hour was spent in almost complete silence, save for the sounds of turning pages and the occasional mumble of confusion. The paperwork wasn't organized alphabetically or in any other way that I could tell. We were looking for a needle in a haystack.

I looked around at everyone, each lost in a file or sorting aimlessly through a box. Bruce scanned quickly over a page, squinting through his glasses and tossing the paper to the side in frustration. Nat sat atop a stack of boxes, her legs crossed and reading a notebook intently. In the corner of the room stood Bucky, rifling quickly through a box of photos. I walked over to him.

"Find anything good?" I asked.

"No." He said shortly, still sifting through the box. "This whole system is a nightmare. You'd think the smartest intelligence agents in the country would've known about the Dewey Decimal System."

I gave a small snort of a laugh. "Apparently you'd be wrong."

Bucky looked up at me then, a small smile lingering over his face. I began to blush, tearing my eyes from his to look around the room. I stood awkwardly for a moment, unsure of what to do. As an idea began to form, I turned to face him again.

"Hey, I was meaning to-"

"Here!" Thor boomed."A box on Strucker"

I stood frozen, feeling dejected. Bucky's eyes faded from hopeful to annoyed. He shook his head slightly and moved toward the rest of the group, who were gathering to listen to Thor.

"Alright, everyone grab some folders from here. See what you can find," Steve said. "I'll keep looking through these boxes to see if I can find anything else."

We each grabbed a few thick manilla folders from the box and began flipping through, searching for even the slightest hint.

"Well these people are all horrible," Bruce half-joked.

Tony looked at what he was holding to see who he'd been talking about, and immediately interjected. "Wait," he cut in, "I know that guy."

I looked up from my box and came over to him, as did the rest of the team. "From back in the day," Tony continued, "he operates off the African coast, black market arms."

Steve glared at him. "It's part of the job, okay?" Tony said defensively. "You meet people. I didn't sell him anything. But he was talking about finding something new, some sort of... game changer. I just thought he was crazy."

"This," Thor reached out and pointed at the man's chest.

"Uhm," said Tony, straining to see what he was referring to, "that's a tattoo. I don't think he had it."

"No, these are tattoos. That is a brand," Thor verified. I could see it now. A jagged pink scar across the man's neck.

Bruce walked over to a computer in the corner of the room and searched for the man's digital file, which had not been deleted. "I've got it," he said, "it's a word in an African dialect. It means 'thief', but uhm... in a less friendly way."

"What dialect?" Nat asked.

"Wakanada? No- Wakanda," he managed.

Tony set the file down and looked to Steve, exchanging silent glances with him. "If this guy got out of Wakanda with some of their trade goods," he spoke in a hushed voice.

"I thought your father said there was no more?" Steve whispered back.

"I don't get it," Sam said, "what comes out of Wakanda?"

Steve and Tony turned toward the wall, where Steve's shield was sitting. He'd taken up the habit of bringing it everywhere, none of us felt completely safe with Ultron on the loose.

"The strongest metal on Earth."