Rumors and Ghosts

vi. agents, soldier, duchess, spy

[If you get the title reference I've made, you're awesome]

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

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

"Safe," Natasha replied.

"Do better!"

"Where did you get it?"

"Why would I tell you?"

"Fury gave it to you. Why?"

"What's on it?"

"I don't know."

"Stop lying!"

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

"I bet you knew Fury hired the pirates, didn't you?" Anastasia said.

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

"I'm not gonna ask you again," Steve told her.

"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," Anastasia stated.

"Five years ago I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran, somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff, I pulled us out, but the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me." 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. I know, I've tried." She held up the flash drive. "Like you said, Anastasia, he's a ghost story."

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

---

Steve, Anastasia and Natasha went to the mall disguised as a civilian couple and their friend.

"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."

"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?" Anastasia asked.

"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, Anastasia 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."