Earth's Mightiest Heroes

HYDRA

I stashed my shield before going up to the vending machine. I ground my teeth when I found it wasn't there. Clint came up behind me and popped his gum. I grabbed his arm and dragged him into an empty room. I slammed into the wall.

"Where is it?" I snapped.

"Safe," he 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 Eyepatch 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."

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

"So he's a ghost story."

"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 Captain was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me." Clint pulled up his shirt to show me the scar just above his hip bone. "A Soviet slug, no rifling. Bye-bye bikinis."

I grimaced at an image I really didn't want. "Yeah, I bet you look terrible in them now."

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

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

I walked out of the room, retrieved my shield, and then walked out of the hospital. A half an hour later we were at the mall dressed as civilians. I stashed my shield just outside the parking lot.

"First rule of going on the run is, don't run, walk," Clint told me.

I scoffed, "If I run in these shoes, I might break something." He had made me wear heeled tennis shoes. Sure I had a pair or two back home but that didn't mean I ran in them. I also had on a tee shirt and hoodie and jeans along with a ball cap and some fake glasses. Clint was wearing jeans, a tee shirt, hoodie and some shoes he called high tops. They didn't really seem like high tops. Tony had higher tops than what Clint was wearing.

We walked into an Apple store. I held back the urge to shutter. Stark Tech was better. Clint went over to one of the computers.

"The drive has a level six homing program, so as soon as we boot up Shield will know exactly where we are," Clint said.

"How much time do we have?" I asked.

"About nine minutes from..." he popped the flash drive into the computer, "now." He typed a few things. "Fury was right about that ship, somebody's trying to hide something. This drive is protected by some sort AI; it keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands."

"Can you override it?"

"The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me. Slightly. I'm gonna try running a tracer. This is a program that Shield developed to track hostile malware, so if we can't read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from."