Silent Vibrations

2: 06

Whilst disguised as a civilian dressed in a hoodie, Steve went back to the hospital to retrieve the flash drive from the vending machine but saw it was gone. Natasha and Chris appeared behind him, the former chewing some gum.

In anger, Steve pushed her into a room, pulling Chris as well, and he demanded, "Where is it?"

"Safe," Natasha replied, signing the conversation so Chris could understand.

"Do better!"

"Where did you get it?" Natasha asked, translating Chris' signing.

"Why would I tell either of you?"

"Fury gave it to you. Why?"

"What's on it?"

"Chris and I don't know," Natasha said.

"Stop lying!"

"I only act like I know everything, Rogers."

"I bet you two knew Fury hired the pirates, didn't you?"

"Well, it makes sense. The ship was dirty, Fury needed a way in, so do you."

"I'm not gonna ask you again."

"Chris and I know who killed Fury. Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists, the ones who do call him the Winter Soldier. He's credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years."

"So he's a ghost story."

"Five years ago Chris and I were escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran, somebody shot out our tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff, Chris and I pulled us out, but the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me. Chris shot him with an arrow, but he got away." She pulled up her shirt to show him the scar on the side of her stomach. "Soviet slug, no rifling. Bye-bye bikinis."

"Yeah, I bet you look terrible in them now," Steve shot back, earning a hint of a smile from Natasha.

"Going after him is a dead end. Chris and I know, we've tried." She held up the flash drive. "Like you said, he's a ghost story."

Steve took the flash drive from her. "Well, let's find out what the ghost wants."

---

Steve and Natasha went to the mall disguised as a civilian couple with their friend. Chris wasn't thrilled to be the third wheel and had made his protests well known.

"First rule of going on the run is, don't run, walk," Natasha instructed.

"If I run in these shoes, they're gonna fall off," Steve said as they went to a Mac store to use one of their computers.

'The drive has a Level Six homing program, so as soon as we boot up S.H.I.E.L.D. will know exactly where we are,' Chris warned.

"How much time do we have?"

"Uh... about nine minutes from..." she popped the flash drive into a MacBook Pro, "Now." Several S.H.I.E.L.D. vehicles headed their way. "Fury was right about that ship, somebody's trying to hide something. This drive is protected by some sort of AI, it keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands."

"Can you override it?"

"The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me. Slightly."

Rumlow and his team pulled up outside the mall and headed inside.

---

Back at the Mac store, Steve, Chris and Natasha continued to try to find out what was on the flash drive. Natasha said, "I'm gonna try running a tracer. This is a program that S.H.I.E.L.D. developed to track hostile malware, so if we can't read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from."