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  Sixty seconds.

  He and the Black Widow broke cover, sprinting for the fence. There was no time to re-holster his bow, so he clutched it under one arm and kept his head down. The terrain was uneven: rocks, mud, and tangles of ground covering succulents and strands of brittle fern. The air smoked with insects.

  She was faster than he was. Her speed was amazing. Arms pumping, lithe and powerful in her matte-black one-piece, she raced for the line.

  Thirty seconds.

  The arrow-load was still spraying mist and emitting its blinder signal. Twenty yards from the fence, Widow slowed her pace and allowed Hawkeye to sprint past her.

  He reached the fence, skidded to a halt, put down his bow and turned to face her, cupping his hands in front of him. The cameras, their feeds disrupted, couldn’t see them. The refractive mist was desensitizing the motion-detecting lasers—without breaking their beams and triggering a fault report.

  Twenty-five seconds.

  The Widow ran right at him, accelerating again. It was all in the timing. She leapt, a long-jumper’s bound, as if she were going to run right up him and kick him in the head. Her left foot landed firmly in the cup of his hands. He hoisted hard with all the strength in his arms, propelling her upwards.

  Arms raised, she cleared the mist-fogged bars of the lasers. He looked up, winced at the sun, and saw her as a flying figure silhouetted against the glare.

  She cleared the razor-wire and executed a perfect somersault over the fence line. Then she dropped feet-first down the inside, and stuck her landing.

  Twenty seconds.

  The mist output from the arrow was beginning to slow down. Widow came up out of her landing crouch and sprinted toward the outbuildings twenty yards away.

  Hawkeye picked up his bow and waited.

  Widow reached the side of the nearest yellow modular, pulled in, and pressed her back to the wall. There was a hatch beside her. She turned sharply and tried it. Locked. She ran a hand down the sill, examined the lock mechanism, and then reached down to her belt for a cutter.

  Come on, he willed.

  Ten seconds.

  The aerosol mist was sputtering out. The glittering laser beams were losing definition and vanishing.

  Come on.

  She tried the cutter. Hawkeye saw the bright flash of its hooded laser drill. It wasn’t cutting. The alloy of the lock was coated with some substance that resisted or reflected the cutting beam. She adjusted the setting, focusing tighter, and tried again.

  Nothing.

  Five seconds, four, three…

  She looked back at him and made a sharp gesture: a sideways jerk of her hand, palm down.

  He dropped, face down, into the dirt at the foot of the fence.

  One second. Zero.

  The arrow gave out. The beams vanished. The emitter died. Motion sensitivity returned, and the camera feeds came back live.

  Damn it.

  Very gently, he turned his head so he could look under the fence. She was trying the hatch again. He dared not move for fear of triggering the motion sensors. He prayed no one would take a good look at the cam-feeds and notice a dark shape lying in the undergrowth at the fence line.

  Widow put away her cutter. No good. She had to find another way in. Sticking tight to the walls of the modular, she was inside the view-cones of the cameras, in their blind spots. That limited her options. She could see another hatch a dozen yards away, but it would probably be locked, too, and she’d have to cross a camera’s field to reach it.

  With a thump, the hatch on which she had been working suddenly unlocked and began to open. Natasha fell back against the wall beside it.

  An A.I.M. technician stepped out. He was dressed in form-fitting, high-collared yellow coveralls, heavy boots, and the distinctive drum-shaped A.I.M. work helmet. His eye-slot was a grille. He was studying a tablet device with a small screen.

  The Widow was right behind the technician. She could see over his shoulder. There was a surveillance schematic on the screen of his tablet, on which several amber circles were pulsing. He’d come outside to check the status of the cameras and find out why they’d gone dark for sixty seconds.

  In Russia, there was a saying about mouths and gift horses.

  Black Widow tackled him from behind. A spine punch to stun him, then an arm-lock to the throat. He was too surprised and hurt to resist or cry out. She slammed his face into the door jamb twice, and then gently lowered his twitching body to the ground.

  She picked up the fallen tablet and finger-flicked through the screens. The device was open for use, the tech’s security code already entered. It gave her full perimeter-security oversight, zone-by-zone.

  That made her happy. She checked the map, identified their section, and then turned off the cameras and the motion sensors nearby.

  She looked back at Hawkeye and nodded.

  He jumped up. He took out his own cutter, sliced through the lower levels of the razor-wire, and ducked through the gap, taking care not to snag his bow. He ran to her.

  She was already moving inside, tablet in hand. Over her shoulder, she nodded to the fallen tech.

  Hawkeye reached the doorway, scooped up the limp tech, and pulled him inside. He closed the hatch after them.

  The corridor was plain and relentlessly yellow. It was several degrees cooler and dryer. Air-con. All the comforts of home in the middle of the most primordial jungle on the planet. Hawkeye hadn’t realized how much he’d been sweating outside or how humid it had been. His skin cooled rapidly, leaving him clammy.

  Widow was already moving, following the plans on the tablet. Again, as though it were an afterthought, she pointed at a storage locker for Hawkeye’s benefit.

  He made an exasperated face, opened the locker, and stowed the fallen tech inside. It took a few shoves to close the door. By that time, Widow was already at the end of the corridor, checking her location. He nocked an arrow and hurried after her.

  She showed him the tablet, and he memorized the floor plan. Widow indicated that she was going right and that he should go left. He nodded.

  They split. Hawkeye reached a service door that she had already unlocked using the tablet. He opened it and went through. He was inside the outer security zone, in a hallway lit with bluish, phosphorescent light. He stole forward, bow ready.

  Widow turned right. She disabled an internal hatch, slipped through it, and looked around. She had entered some kind of work bay. Two A.I.M. technicians, again dressed in yellow with drum helmets, were checking a row of bench-mounted instruments on the far side of the bay. She waited in the shadows for a moment. They exchanged comments that she couldn’t quite hear, and then headed for the exit.

  She shadowed them as they passed through a security hatch into a double-height chamber with rooms off to one side. Heavy-duty pipe-work ran overhead. She could smell hot metal and traces of minerals, probably from some kind of hydro-filter. As soon as the two techs had moved through the next compartment door, she started checking the side rooms. They were small, clean labs. One contained a hydraulic rack of clear flasks filled with a bright-orange liquid. She didn’t have the pass codes to access the console beneath the flasks, and her stolen tablet was open to compound security systems, not research data.

  An A.I.M. technician entered the lab behind her. The cloth overshoes of his yellow work suit had muffled his footsteps.

  Widow smiled broadly and uttered a sexy little laugh, tilting her head back and holding out the tablet in a gesture that suggested she needed help with its operation.

  Natasha’s service in several cold, clandestine wars had taught her all the tricks of covert operation. Timing was a key one. When surprise was on your side, it was a powerful asset. But when surprise gave an opponent the advantage, you had to reclaim it fast. It didn’t take much. It was all psychology. The relaxed laugh and the confident gesture bought her a second, probably less. In that moment, the A.I.M. tech didn’t read her appearance: a female intruder in a decidedly non-A.I.M.-is
sue one-piece. He read her body language. It told him, “I’m not surprised to see you. In fact, I was actually hoping to run into you.”

  Less than a second. Just enough to make him hesitate. Just enough to delay him reaching for the alarm pull.

  Just enough for her to fell him with a bicycle kick.

  The tech went down hard. She landed on top of him and punched him twice in the back of the neck. She rolled his unconscious, paralyzed body into the space behind the door.

  He had been carrying a tablet of his own. She picked it up. It was sleeping and locked. She pulled off the tech’s left glove and applied his finger and thumb tips to the print reader until she found the whorl that opened the tablet screen.

  Someone else was approaching. She ducked out of sight, watched three yellow figures pass the doorway, and then ghosted out of the lab behind them. In the main space of the chamber, she unzipped the throat of her suit and tucked the tablets inside against her breastbone. Then she leapt up, caught hold of one of the metal pipes, and hauled herself into the ceiling space.

  She hid among the pipe-work, planking across two large water pipes with her body straight and parallel to the floor. Holding herself stable with her left arm, she fished out the tablets, put the security tablet on top of the pipe beside her, and then balanced the other against a pipe bracket and began to flick through the screens.

  It was research data: nanotech compounds in fluid suspension, water supplies, parts per trillion, circulation rates.

  Nanotechnology. She knew a great deal about that, from her S.H.I.E.L.D. training, but this data was at Stark levels of complexity.

  A week earlier, Tony Stark had briefed the Avengers on a nanotech issue that had come to his attention. He was concerned about the potential development of what he called “nanoform assembly systems” in the East Coast area. Apparently, Stark Industries mapped and monitored worldwide sales of certain metals, components, and synthetics—and from the movement of those “ingredients” was able to accurately predict who might be developing what technology, and where. An agency on the East Coast was acquiring synthetics that suggested, to Stark, a massive spike in nanotech construction.

  Was this A.I.M. operation tied to that? If she had a secure and working telecomm link, she could squirt the data to Stark and get his appraisal.

  But she didn’t. She and Hawkeye had come to the Savage Land pursuing an anonymous tip, a circulating rumor picked up through S.H.I.E.L.D. listening stations in Central Europe. How did this connect to the East Coast alert? Did it connect?

  Maybe she could access the A.I.M. compound’s communication uplink and call in for a consultation.

  She shifted her weight onto both hands. She’d been planking for seven minutes, and her left arm was beginning to tire. She thought about dropping down out of the pipes, but a group of six A.I.M. techs was moving along the chamber below, performing a slow and methodical check of environmental wall monitors. She looked down at the tops of their heads through the grid of heavy pipes.

  Nine minutes. She was extraordinarily fit, but the effort was taking its toll. She switched to one hand again, her right this time, and used her left to retrieve the tablets and slip them back inside the front of her suit so she could dismount as soon as the techs were gone. Her left hand was a little numb, and she fumbled with the second tablet.

  It fell.

  She snapped her hand out and caught it before it dropped out of reach and clattered to the deck below. She froze, in case the techs had noticed the sudden movement in their peripheral vision.

  They hadn’t. Thank god for drum-shaped A.I.M. headgear.

  The techs left the chamber. Widow swung up on her arms like a gymnast rising on the asymmetric bars and dropped feet-first to the floor.

  She flexed her arms and hands and headed for the next door.

  There was another hallway beyond. Smoke extractors bulged like mushrooms from the ceiling. Was the designer particularly worried about fire? Or were they intended for rapid atmosphere cleaning? Say, in the event of a sudden, accidental nanotech release?

  Widow tried to clear her head. She was tech-speculating too much when her concentration had to be on covert infil.

  Side doors opened onto a walkway above a large factory space. She could see yellow-suited technicians below, working on a large filtration system. More extractor systems, larger than the ones in the hallway, bulged from the roof.

  She took out the security tablet and flicked through the floor plans, trying to identify a telecommunications hub. Power-cable overlays suggested something promising near the junction of the next hallway.

  She avoided two more techs and reached the junction. The hatch to the target rooms was shut. She couldn’t just walk into the unknown. She had to check layout and occupants.

  She weighed the tablets, one in each hand. A quick check of the network menu allowed her to tether one to the other. She set the research tablet to camera mode and then fastened it at head height to the wall opposite the hatch using a spritz of contact adhesive from a tiny tube in her belt kit.

  Then she stepped back against the wall beside the hatch. She checked the other tablet and saw that a small window had popped up in the corner of the display. Now she had a clear view of the hatchway as a realtime feed. She scissored her fingertips to expand the window. Resolution was good.

  Someone was coming. She stepped back into the shadows behind some floor-to-ceiling ducts. Two A.I.M. operatives walked past. Their yellow suits had black hazard jags on the sleeves, and were reinforced with graphene ballistic plates on the chest, back, shoulders, and groin. They wore Sperek Six 9mm handguns in fast-draw holsters. Security. It was oddly reassuring to see some muscle about the place. A.I.M., unlike Hydra or the Secret Empire, was more about brains than brawn, and somehow that made it more unpredictable and dangerous.

  The guards were not so smart, though. They completely missed seeing the tablet fixed to the hallway wall—probably because she’d been careful to place it straight, at operating level, so it looked like it was supposed to be there.

  She raised the security tablet and checked that the feed window was still open, showing her the hatch. She selected “release/open” on the hatch’s menu.

  The hatch opened with a gentle breeze of air conditioning.

  The tablet on the wall fed her a decent view into the chamber.

  It was a telecommunications hub, all right: a circular room lined with networked transceiver terminals, amplifiers, power systems, and flatscreen displays. Three A.I.M. operators manned stations. Two had their drum-hats off so they could wear headsets and see the displays properly. A fourth tech, a supervisor, was on his feet, watching them work. A security guard in a black-chevroned suit stood inside the door to the right.

  Five targets. It was impossible to tell whether there was anybody else in the room, because it was partly screened from her view by the doorframe and the corridor wall. Given the circular plan of the hub, more personnel seemed likely, so she estimated a total of seven. Tricky, but not impossible. The guard took priority. He was armed.

  She watched the feed. The security guard noticed the door had opened and that no one had entered. He crossed to the doorway, saw nobody in the hallway, went back inside, and closed the hatch.

  Widow had two nine-mil automatics, but she was going to need a hand free for the tablet. She primed the Bite bracelet on her left wrist and drew one of the nines in her right hand. Before she and Barton had approached the fence, she had fitted both nines with small tube suppressors.

  She moved to the hatch and stood facing it, nine raised. She pressed “release/open” and stepped through the hatch as soon as it slid wide.

  The guard had his back to her. He began to turn as soon as he heard the hatch opening. With the tablet still clasped in her left hand, she shot him in the grille of his drum-hat’s visor with her Bite bracelet. The Widow’s Bite delivered an electrostatic blast of about twenty thousand volts. The security guard lurched backwards and fell, convulsing.r />
  Widow was already moving past him. Straight-armed, she fired the suppressed nine. Each shot was a plosive whisper, a spit. She took down the supervisor first, two rounds to the central body mass. He was still falling over as she retrained her aim.

  The operators in headphones were concentrating on their work, but they had seen the sudden movement reflected in their screens. Both were armed. She hit one with her Bite before he could move. The other was turning and reaching for his sidearm when a round from her silenced nine took him out of his seat.

  About three seconds had elapsed since her entry. The third operator was reacting as bodies slumped and fell on either side of him. He said something that was muffled by his drum-hat and reached frantically for the alarm pull. She put a shot through his wrist to stop him and followed it immediately with a second Bite that threw the man against his console and left him twitching on the deck.

  She rotated, gun ready, covering the rest of the room. Five down. There was no one else present who might have been hidden from the feed view, after all.

  Five seconds, and the target area was secured.

  She went back into the hallway, tore the tablet off the wall, and returned to the hub, closing and locking the hatch behind her.

  She appraised the various transceiver consoles and then went to the station that looked most likely to suit her needs. She pulled the dead operator out of her way on his wheeled chair and sent him rolling across the room. She propped the research tablet up against the console and linked it wirelessly to the communication system. Then, leaning over the console, she started to use the keyboard to remotely align the uplink dishes on the compound’s roof.

  The entire telecommunications system was a high-end digital network manufactured by a U.S. firm, probably bought off the rack by A.I.M. She’d done familiarity training on hundreds of different systems, so it came easily. She shut off the encryption prohibiting international transmissions, selected data transfer, and tapped in the passcodes for Avengers Priority and S.H.I.E.L.D. She entered her own, unique identity signature, and added a tag for her exact location.