I Am The Storm

Chapter Ten

There was no doubt about it, Hydra was inside Stark Industries.

Tony ran a hand down his face, trying to see everything in a different light. Under the cover of darkness perhaps, because the sun had long been set. The soft blue glow of Tony's screens was the only light source in the lab. Tony's cup of coffee was cold, but he still took a sip, trying to figure out how to find the right evidence to convict whoever was infiltrating his company.

In hindsight, someone probably should have noticed a few inconsistencies earlier. Now that Tony looked at any idiot could have found it if that idiot looked hared enough. Moments where cameras were shut off in strange places, holes in data that were present before, things like that.

Between all of these events, he hadn't been secure since early 2015, less than a year after S.H.I.E.L.D. went mostly underground. Maybe it hadn't been Hydra all the time, possibly some other organization that was similar. There were probably times where it was just a mistake that never got fixed. But with the consistencies, at least once or twice a week in this building alone for the past few weeks? That was far too much for mistakes.

Tony just had to find a way for someone to view it that way from an outsider's point of view, that way he wouldn't be dragged to court for imprisoning an innocent person. There was just so much data to cover, and a finite amount of time. These events were somehow all interconnected, but finding a way to show that would be harder than him seeing it.

Tony stared up at the video footage Friday had brought up, trying to catch every little thing that crossed the cameras.

Tony sighed and dropped his head onto the desk. Why couldn't he think?

"Friday?"

"Yes Boss?" the AI answered.

"Pull up the employees that were consistently in the control room when the cameras went out," Tony said, taking another swig of the cold coffee.

A few seconds of filtering later, Friday had pulled up about a dozen faces of employees.

"Can you bring up the numbers of their presence during the camera blackouts. And group together the ones that were working together during the blackouts," Friday did as he asked. There was an average of two dozen black outs between three people, the others present when a few blackouts happened.

Tony stared at the faces for a few minutes. There wasn't enough data to convict anyone; the data was merely more than coincidence right now.

The door of the lab opened, throwing a yellow light into the dark room. Light footsteps walked up behind Tony. Pepper put her hands on Tony's shoulders and squeezed slightly, glancing up at the faces on Tony's screen.

"Saving the world again?" she said, laughing softly.

"Saving Stark Industries a lot of trouble. I talked to that kid downstairs the other day. Someone stole her plans for some nanotechnology and she thought I took them. I think we've been infiltrated by something, probably Hydra,"

"They've been underground for a while," Pepper said.

"Yeah, they have. But here's the thing," Tony stood up and touched the screen, pushing it back to all the footage put on a timeline with each year on it's own line.

"These blackouts started in early 2015, a little less than a year after S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra officially went down. Of course, they are both still up and running unofficially, but that doesn't matter as much. They were sporadic enough for no one to notice, or if anyone did notice, they wrote it off as a mistake. They became a little more consistent middle of last year, especially around the cells downstairs. By June though, they calmed down. In those two years, there were only around two dozen 'blackouts'," Tony glanced back at Pepper, who was watching the footage in earnest. When Tony fell silent, she looked back down at him and motioned for him to continue.