The Death Of Captain America Read online

  “It is inconceivable that Doom’s pride would allow him to deliver faulty material.”

  Zola’s unblinking red eye turns so the Red Skull can see his own reflection in it, distorted like a fun-house mirror.

  “Yet he offered no guarantee, did he? I could have unraveled its secrets if you would have given me more time, and the doors of eternity could be open to us.”

  “Nobody is given more time, Zola. But it might be possible to seize enough time to meet our ends if we are audacious and risk all.”

  The Red Skull steps carefully toward the door.

  “Call for me when you have the girl ready. I shall be in my suite watching the debate.”

  Frantic A.I.M. techs are running down the hall when Skull opens the door.

  “Doctor Faustus is gone! He erased all his drives and took the backups with him.”

  Red Skull lurches, then spins to face Zola.

  “We are betrayed! The schedule is meaningless. We must act now, or all is lost. Zola, go get the girl!”

  FORTY-THREE

  THE last time I saw Arnim Zola, as grotesque as he is, he seemed benign to me. Now, after Doctor Faustus has given me back my mind, I see what he really is: a monster.

  Zola storms into the ICU—slamming the door, knocking aside the medical cart that stands in his way. He looms over me, an ugly colossus of anodized metal and black rubber. The holographic face in the robotic thorax is glowering.

  He unlocks the four-point restraints that bind my wrists and ankles and pulls me forcefully from the bed.

  “It is time. Come with me.”

  My fingers are so numb from lack of circulation that I lose my grip on the precious article I have been clutching since Faustus pressed it into my palm. It falls, bounces off the bed, and clatters across the tiled floor.

  Zola knows what it is immediately.

  As he bends down to retrieve my GPS unit, the floor shakes, and a massive pressure change pops my eardrums. An explosion. A big one. It would need to be sizeable to rock the foundations of this underground fortress: bunker busters. It has to be a S.H.I.E.L.D. raid.

  Zola locks my wrists together with steel manacles and drags me out into the hall. Kronas security teams are rushing about toting energy weapons, while A.I.M. techs are driving mini-tractors pulling small Tesla cannons.

  One of the beekeepers tells Zola that it is indeed S.H.I.E.L.D. assaulting the facility. Reports indicate Black Widow and Falcon are leading. They have already breached all the main entryways and are fighting their way to the inner-core security areas.

  I know I don’t have a chance in hell of getting away from Zola in my present condition. My bandages are still seeping blood, and I can barely hobble along on my numb feet. I have to play along and hold out until Sam and Natasha can reach me. My only advantage is that Zola doesn’t know that Faustus gave me back control of my mind.

  Zola’s mechanical fingers yank at my manacles, forcing me to limp down the hall behind him.

  “Our forces can hold them off long enough for us to keep our appointment with destiny, girl.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. But I do know that I’m going to make it through this, and I’m going to enjoy the hell out putting my foot through that ugly holographic face.

  INTERLUDE #23

  SIN appears very prim and proper sitting in the auditorium. She’s wearing sensible glasses, with her hair tied back in a neat chignon. Her bustier and leathers have been traded for a conservative linen suit and medium-heel pumps. Her father’s voice crackles with considerable static through her earpiece.

  “Everything has gone to hell in a handbasket, but I am still counting on you, Sin. Faustus has betrayed us, and S.H.I.E.L.D. is at our gates, but nothing will deter me from my original plan. It is essential that you carry out your mission to the letter. Do you understand?”

  “Of course, Father. I’m not an idiot.”

  “Senator Wright is not to be killed. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly clear.”

  “You are to shoot the candidate next to Wright—and when the senator pushes the other candidate to the floor seemingly to save him, you are to fire at the spot where Wright had been standing, as if he were the next target.”

  “I know the plan, Father.”

  “I’ve been tolerant of you despite your serial failures and egregious incompetence. This is your chance to vindicate yourself, so do not disappoint me.”

  Sin rises from her seat and makes her way to a media booth looking down on the stage from the second tier of seats. She has a pass card that unlocks the booth. Once inside, it is a simple matter for her to dispose of the newscaster and cameraman with the two nylon daggers she had carried through the metal detectors at the entrance. Sin notes with a little pride that she didn’t even have to use the plastic squeeze bottle of disabling ammonia in her pocket. Father would be proud, if he were remotely capable of it.

  Four Kane-Meyer security guards enter the booth with assault rifles, accompanied by an A.I.M. tech wearing a stagehand’s overalls. The tech is carrying two long aluminum light-stand cases. Sin snaps open the locks of one case to reveal a sniper rifle nestled in foam rubber.

  With the Kane-Meyer goons securing the door to the booth, Sin sets up a shooting rest, loads a round into the chamber of the rifle, and takes aim through the telescopic sight. She puts the crosshairs neatly on the meaty part of Senator Wright’s left arm.

  “Failures and incompetence? The hell with you, Father Dearest.”

  She raises the crosshairs to Wright’s forehead and begins to take up the slack on the trigger.

  FORTY-FOUR

  A PERFECTLY timed throw sends the red-white-and blue shield flying out of the wings to deflect the bullet ten feet in front of the podium.

  One microsecond earlier; one microsecond later; and the intersection of jacketed lead and Vibranium would not have occurred.

  S.H.I.E.L.D. had given Bucky the heads-up as soon as the facial-recognition scans had spotted Sin in the audience. The Red Skull’s daughter had left her seat by the time Bucky had arrived at the auditorium. It was the ex-boy-soldier’s eye, trained in combat, that had spotted the distinctive silhouette of a sniper in the media booth, and it was the ballistic calculations of the trained Soviet operative that had plotted the timing. But it was a powered arm built by S.H.I.E.L.D. technicians under the command of Nick Fury that had thrown the mighty shield.

  The shield hits the auditorium’s far wall and bounces back across the stage, where a blur flashing out of the sidelines snatches it out of the air. The Secret Service agents have their guns drawn but are hesitant to shoot since the blur is wearing a familiar uniform.

  “Who the hell are you?” they yell in confusion.

  The blur coalesces into a figure they know, bounding over the first-tier seats and leaping toward the media booths.

  “Can’t you tell? I’m Captain America.”

  SIN has seen this new Cap in action and is still wearing a shoulder brace as a reminder. She knows the four Kane-Meyer agents and the A.I.M. tech are not going to hold him for long. She also knows that the Secret Service agents are hustling all the candidates out of the building and into armored limos as per their protocols. Sin grabs the second aluminum light-stand case, exits the booth, and heads for the stairs that lead to the roof.

  INTERLUDE #24

  SIN knows full-well that acknowledging your own faults and being able to do anything about them are two different things. She is acutely aware of the consequences of her impetuous actions. She knows from the grim experience of her entire childhood that all of her disobediences, no matter how secret, had somehow been made known to her father. She has suspected that he had her programmed to confess her misdeeds in her sleep and imagined him beside her bed bending his ear to her nocturnal mea culpas.

  She is less afraid of being under one of the wet patches of concrete in the basement than of the process that would lead to that interment. She knows of her father’s hands-on enjoyment
of imaginative punishments, and his belief in the efficacy of “making good examples out of bad apples.”

  Throwing a monkey wrench into her father’s plans by attempting to kill Wright was a mistake. She knows he will find out somehow, but her primary failure was in not killing the other candidate. That, at least, she can rectify. If she can’t get satisfaction from sabotaging Red Skull’s agenda, she can win back some of his appreciation for her lethal abilities.

  At the top of the fire stairs, Sin convinces the agent from the Treasury Department security detail that she is a student fleeing the gunshots long enough to disable him with a squeeze from her plastic bottle of ammonia, then finish him off with one of her nylon daggers. The sniper the Secret Service placed on the roof is so intent on the updates coming through his earpiece that he doesn’t hear Sin until she slams the nylon dagger through his spine at the base of his skull.

  Opening the long aluminum case, Sin is at first taken aback by the sight of an actual folding light-stand nested in the gray foam rubber. She removes the stand, peels back the foam, and smiles at what is revealed beneath.

  She thinks her father’s contingency plans are always just as good as the main event. If this doesn’t put her back in his good graces, nothing will.

  The weapon she lifts out of the case has been a favorite of insurgents and terrorists as far back as the Vietnam War and is still in use by Al Qaeda and others: an RPG-7 Russian-designed, rocket-propelled, shoulder-fired anti-tank missile launcher.

  The RPG-7’s piezoelectric-detonated shaped-charge warhead is more than enough to punch through the roof of an armored Secret Service limousine, like the ones now parked in front of the auditorium awaiting their illustrious passengers.

  Sin peeks over the parapet. Her only question now is,

  “Which one first?”

  FORTY-FIVE

  ZOLA told me it was going to hurt, and it was like getting a root canal on my whole body. That psychotic brain-in-abox zapped me with something as he dragged me into a room at the end of his lab that pulsated with a blue light. I think it was supposed to knock me out—and it almost did,while sending a jolt through my entire nervous system. The world turned into white light and unspeakable pain, but I could hear Zola and Red Skull clear as a bell through it all.

  They are strapping me into a machine that holds me upright. I can’t see through the white light, but I know there’s something in front of me that’s giving off a cold glow. I feel dizzy, like I’m on the sloping deck of a ship in rough seas.

  The Red Skull is telling Zola to hurry up—that he doesn’t want to be caught by his enemies, trapped in the body he’s in.

  I feel needles piercing me in several places. The hum of the machinery gets louder, and the rate of the light pulses increases.

  “Is the connection to the Immersion Room complete?”

  That’s the Red Skull. What’s he talking about?

  What is the Immersion Room?

  “Don’t worry about that, Herr Skull. The connection will be intact when we need it. Right now, the catalyst is in place and working perfectly.”

  “How can you be sure of that, Zola? Can it all work properly without the baby? You said the DNA of the fetus was important.”

  Now, they’ve got my attention. There’s a baby involved? I have to save it! Now they’ve given me the impetus to will my consciousness back into control.

  Now I’m determined to fight back.

  “The process will probably work without the baby’s DNA. As long as we have the Constant, we are in safe waters, and we still have our contingency plan ready for containment in the Immersion Room.”

  The Constant? They keep talking about the Constant—wait, am I the Constant? And Zola knows a lot about transferring his consciousness to other bodies…

  They’re going to put the Red Skull in my body!

  They’re going to—

  No.

  That doesn’t make sense.

  The white light is fading, and I can see something coming together in the pulsing blueness right in front of me.

  “This is taking too long, Zola. How do we even know he is actually in the timestream, and that we can extract him?”

  What? Who are they talking about now?

  “The temporal-distortion bullets in her gun did their job, Herr Skull. We know what they buried in the casket wasn’t what they thought.”

  Oh, my god. I know who they’re talking about. I know—

  And I see him.

  He’s materializing in the blueness. It’s him, it’s him, it’s him…

  “There you are, Skull. You can see for yourself that it’s working. You will have no need of your ‘contingency plan’ in the Immersion Room.”

  They don’t know I’m still conscious. They don’t know that Doctor Faustus released me from his command. They don’t know I’m back in control and no longer passively following their game plan. They don’t know how much I can push back right now.

  I am only the Constant if I am not in command of myself. That was why they needed Doctor Faustus. But that’s changed now.

  Go to hell, Red Skull. You are not getting your way.

  “What’s going on, Zola? He’s fading away. He’s supposed to be phasing back into our continuum—”

  The blueness goes away.

  The white light consumes everything, and the room goes silent.

  Colors begin to reconstruct as motes float into the light and grow larger. Sounds creep in, turning from barely audible mutterings to real words. I’m no longer upright, confined in a machine, but on my hands and knees with the stink of burning metal in my nose.

  “She did this on her own, Zola? She destroyed the device? This insignificant girl?”

  “Complete failure of Faustus’ control protocols. She was supposed to have no will. She broke the connection and shorted out the device.”

  “Fix it, Zola!”

  “There’s no time. S.H.I.E.L.D. forces will be here any moment.”

  Pain.

  Now I’m feeling real pain. The Red Skull is kicking me, over and over again.

  “My plans are ruined!”

  “There’s no time for this, Herr Skull. We are not ruined, but delayed for a time. We must get out of here.”

  “There is no way out for me, Zola. No way out of Lukin’s head.”

  I roll over on to my back and try to gather my strength. I hear their footsteps fading through Zola’s lab and down the corridor. Zola’s metallic voice carries over the increasing volume of gunfire.

  “That is not exactly true. We can still accomplish part of the plan.”

  I force myself to my feet and stumble through the lab, out into the hall. The bitter stench of whatever they use as propellant these days is everywhere. A Kronas security trooper is sprawled motionless in the doorway, so I relieve him of his pistol and make sure there’s a live round in the chamber. I proceed down the hallway and away from the sound of shooting.

  FORTY-SIX

  FALCON and Black Widow are functioning as point for a S.H.I.E.L.D. heavy-weapons team. Eighty percent of the facility is cleared and under friendly control. The sound of intermittent fire can be heard from isolated pockets of hard-liners. Spearheading straight through the defenders,Falcon and Black Widow fought their way into the medical bay where their GPS locaters had honed in on Sharon Carter. But all they found was Sharon’s GPS unit itself, amid the rubble in the ICU.

  The power has been cut off to most of the facility, so the only illumination is from the tactical lights on the helmets of the weapons team and battery-operated red lock-down lights in the corridors.

  Farther down the hall and through two security doors, they have a dicey moment when they enter Arnim Zola’s lab and their lead weapons squad opens fire on what appears to be Zola himself. Falcon steps over the smoking remains of the “spare” Zola bodies and enters the room at the lab’s far end. The wreckage of Doctor Doom’s device is still smoldering, and parts of it have not lost their pale-blue glow.

>   Black Widow follows Falcon and says, “That’s what this was all about. That’s what Zola was building for Red Skull, and Sharon was supposed to be a part of the process. Doctor Faustus’ only job was to get Sharon ready for this.”

  Falcon can only surmise that Black Widow has had access to far more intel than he has to be able to make those deductions.

  A S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in pocked-and-charred battle armor reports breathlessly that Falcon and Black Widow need to see what’s been found in the next room.

  The room has been torn apart, from the inside.

  A large superhuman containment device dominates the room—or rather, what’s left of the device. Whoever had been locked in it had torn it apart when the power cut out and the strength dampers went dead. The steel flanges that supported the device have been bent back, and some appear to be missing.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking about who was confined in here, ’Tasha?”

  “The guy you and Bucky were tailing from Minneapolis. Burnside, the Skull’s fake Captain America.”

  Large cables lead from the device to the wall that abuts Zola’s lab and the room where Doctor Doom’s machine was housed. Falcon notes that judging by their newness, the cables were added relatively recently.

  “And what do you make of the renovations?”

  “I think we’d better get cracking and find Sharon.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  I CATCH up to Zola and the Red Skull near the end of a hidden security corridor. I don’t think I could have if they hadn’t stopped in a room filled with more of Zola’s bizarre equipment. Luckily, I got there just as they were leaving it. No idea what they were doing in there. When I took a quick peek inside, the only thing that caught my eye was a bank of monitors, all frozen with the big digits 0.000.

  It takes everything I have to keep going. Passing out is not an option. What if they’re going after the baby they were talking about?