The Death Of Captain America Read online

  “Are you on your own, Barnes? Or did somebody send you?”

  Bucky shrugs off his leather jacket and puts on his Winter Soldier mask.

  “I’m here on Nick Fury’s say-so.”

  “You sure it’s really him? Word is that it’s an L.M.D.

  taking his place.”

  “He’s the genuine article. In fact, he just told me where the shooter is. Can you fly and carry me at the same time?”

  THE lift and thrust generated by Falcon’s cybernetically controlled wings and magnetic drive are more than adequate to carry Bucky high into the darkening sky. Bucky points out the news helicopter that a S.H.I.E.L.D. spy satellite spotted as it swooped down to pick up the shooter. It’s exactly where Fury said it would be.

  “That’s it. Nobody questioned another news chopper out for an event like this. By the way, you’ve never had the power cut out on you while flying, have you?”

  “Black Panther built in two backups for every system in my flying harness. ‘Built to last in Wakanda.’”

  Falcon is trying to approach the helicopter from its blind spot, but a black-and-white skull mask is peering back at them. Not the Red Skull—one of his henchmen, Brock Rumlow, the mercenary called Crossbones. The helicopter tilts forward, trading lift for speed as Bucky draws both of his pistols and slips off the safeties.

  “Whoa,” says Falcon. “I thought we were supposed to take them in, not down.”

  Bucky opens fire.

  “I’m forcing them to set down. Every helo pilot knows how to auto-rotate and land after a catastrophic engine failure.”

  The big .45-caliber slugs rip through the engine cowling. Black smoke swirls in cyclonic twists in the rotor wash as oil and hydraulic fluid spew into the wind. The helicopter drops to rooftop level as lift bleeds off. The pilot tells the big mercenary with the death’s-head mask that the controls won’t work without hydraulic pressure. He hears Crossbones say, “The hell with it.” And when he looks, the door is open and the copilot’s seat is empty.

  Falcon has barely registered the big, black, leather-clad form barreling at him before it slams into Bucky and rips him from his grip. He sees Crossbones and Bucky plummeting toward the rooftops below, locked together, trading blows. But a glance in the other direction tells him the crippled helicopter is slewing toward a crowded housing project. Falcon makes his decision and follows the helicopter.

  The laterally downward velocity of the two black-clad combatants is checked somewhat by a billboard touting the registration law. Their landing amid water tanks and chimneys would have killed normal men, or left them crippled. These two are far from normal, and they’ve both been through worse.

  They roll apart, spring back to their feet, and face off. Brock Rumlow knows exactly whom he is fighting.

  “Winter Soldier, is it? Don’t tell me you think you’re a good guy now?”

  The punch the powered prosthetic arm delivers is faster than the eye can see, and it sends Crossbones flying.

  “Not exactly,” Winter Soldier replies as he follows up with a roundhouse kick and a flurry of jabs.

  Brock Rumlow had come up through the street gangs on the Lower East Side. He’s no stranger to savage beat-downs—although he’s usually the pitcher, not the catcher,since he came into his size. Now, the punches and kicks are coming too fast for Crossbones to block, and his arms and legs are starting to go rubbery. Between the devastating barrages, Winter Soldier interrogates the mercenary.

  “Where’s the Red Skull? I know he’s pulling your strings!”

  “Go die,” Rumlow grunts through bloody teeth. “Oh, wait. You already did.”

  Winter Soldier delivers a right hook that sends Crossbones crashing to the tarred surface of the roof just as Falcon lands on the parapet. His hard-light wings retract into his flying harness as he steps down to face Bucky.

  “You took your time getting here,” Barnes says.

  Falcon jerks a thumb toward the housing project.

  “Had to keep that helo from impacting negatively on low-income families. You have to consider collateral damage if you want to be a good guy, Bucky. And you need to get out of here before the Cape-Killers show up. S.H.I.E.L.D. just ramped up their alert status to ’red,’ and they’ll be flooding the nabe with their people pretty damned soon.”

  Winter Soldier kicks the supine Crossbones in the ribs.

  “I’m gone. But keep an eye on this trash until somebody comes to haul him away. Gunpowder residue will show up on his hands. Forensics should be able to match his boots to the prints in the vacant office on Foley Square.”

  He pauses before he disappears over the edge of the roof.

  “Get over to Mercy Hospital and watch Cap’s back. I’d do it myself, but—hell, you know.”

  Crossbones is beginning to moan and clutch his ribs when the first Cape-Killers arrive.

  INTERLUDE #4

  MOST New Yorkers are savvy about violence on the streets. They back away from their windows when they hear a commotion outside, lest they get hit by a bullet marked “to whom it may concern.” The few who actually witnessed the fight between Winter Soldier and Crossbones assumed that what they saw was another action movie being filmed, or cosplayers taking their hobby too far.

  One witness knew exactly what was going on. Her name is Sinthea Schmidt, sometimes known as “Sin” and always known as the Red Skull’s daughter. Her relationship with Crossbones could, by some stretch of the imagination, be called romantic—if your idea of romance is a straight-razor fight between the Marquis de Sade and Ilse Koch, “She-Wolf of the SS.”

  She had ascended to the roof to watch her paramour’s helicopter escape and seen the interception. Ten blocks away, the figures plummeting from the helicopter were little more than dots in the darkening sky. They were out of her line of sight after they had gone through the billboard, but she was certain that Crossbones would have survived. It was a matter of whether he could best whoever it was that had shot down the helo.

  Right now, she is very angry, which is her usual condition after speaking to her father. Red Skull had wanted a son and heir, and had been about to fling the newborn Sin into the sea when the woman who would become Mother Night intervened and volunteered to raise her. The parameters her father had set for her upbringing were uncommonly cruel, and her childhood had been a black hole of anger and exultation in the pain of others. Not only had she stared into Nietzsche’s abyss and had it stare back at her, the abyss had engulfed her and become her friend.

  The card Sin had extracted from the cheap, prepaid cell phone she had used for that communication has already been crushed under her heel and flung off the roof. She had reported that Crossbones was in danger of being taken into custody, that she needed to go to his aid. Red Skull, being pragmatic and ruthless, had ordered her to continue with what she had been ordered to do. She had bitten her lip and said, “Fine.”

  Sin must let the rage simmer out of her before she can even move. Her father always has to have his own way. He has a tremendous ego, but someday his chickens will come to roost—and she will be there to gloat. For now, she bides her time and follows his orders.

  Sin covers her bright-red shag with a curly black wig, adjusts the fit of her light-green scrubs, and goes down the stairs under the big lit-up “Mercy Hospital” sign.

  The security around the ER and trauma center is dense, wary, and trigger-happy. Civilian visitation has been curtailed, and hospital staff IDs are double-checked and matched against shift rosters. Everybody entering the emergency room must pass through a metal detector, and there are no exceptions. Sin is wearing the ID badge of Bridget Connaught, a brunette nurse who is currently double-bagged and duct-taped in storage units in Bayonne, Elizabeth, and Newark. Young Ms. Schmidt took Bridget’s place on the day she was supposed to transfer to Mercy from All Souls in the Bronx, three days ago. Her superiors have noted that her startling lack of procedural knowledge is offset by a remarkable coolness under fire even when dealing with the most
gruesome trauma cases. The ER doctors know she won’t flinch if asked to “hold this,” “clamp that,” or “push that back into place.”

  The S.H.I.E.L.D. security team double-checks “Bridget’s” ID and is about to run a facial-recognition scan when a passing surgeon says, “That’s Nurse Connaught. She’s okay.” When the ER resident comes out of the trauma center to seek out the woman in the black-and-white uniform who rode the ambulance with Steve Rogers, Sin is wheeling a used “sharps” bin through the waiting room. She hears the doctor tell Sharon Carter that Rogers has been pronounced dead. She sees Carter collapse into a plastic chair and weep into the Falcon’s chest. Sin feels no empathy at all for Carter’s anguish and loss. She despises her as a weakling who sucks up sympathy from gullible men. She is glad to be the agent of even more pain for her.

  On her third pass through the waiting room, Sin panics momentarily when she sees Falcon sitting alone. A quick scan reveals the door to the women’s lavatory still swinging closed.

  Red Skull’s daughter enters the ladies room. Her white shoes squeak on the tile. Sharon Carter is at a sink splashing cold water on her face.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. The doctor asked me to tell you something.”

  Carter is drying her face with a paper towel.

  “Which doctor would that be?”

  “Doctor Faustus.”

  Sharon whips around to face the nurse. Her face looks familiar, but there’s something wrong with the expression.It’s not the mask of professional detachment or the feigned look of sympathy. There is malice, and a certain glee when she speaks again.

  “He says, ‘Remember.’”

  Sharon Carter’s reaction to the two trigger phrases is immediate. Her body goes rigid, and her eyes roll up in her head.

  Sinthea Schmidt knows what she triggered, and she can imagine the sights and sounds that are flashing through Sharon Carter’s mind. The courthouse steps. The shot ringing out across Foley Square. The spray of blood. Steve Rogers collapsing. The crowd running in confusion and that moment when all eyes were turned toward the window from which the shot was fired. That moment when Sharon Carter obeyed the command Doctor Faustus had implanted in her and fired three very special bullets into Captain America.

  Sharon collapses into the corner of the lavatory, so stunned by the revelation that she doesn’t notice the nurse going out the door or the smirk upon her freckled face.

  PART TWO

  CONTEMPLATIONS

  OF

  MORTALITY

  SIX

  VAL insisted on walking with me to the wake, so I couldn’t refuse. Her full title and name is Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine. Most S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel call her Contessa—but she told me to call her “Val” years ago, and that sort of stuck. She calls me “Sharon,” with the ghost of an “a” at the end. It makes me feel a little glamorous when I hear her say it that way. Val had a long-running thing going with Nick Fury in the wild and wooly days, and I’ve always liked her, which would seem to be two good reasons to confide in her. But I don’t.

  The neighborhood we’re walking through is the one Steve Rogers grew up in. Working-class Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian with abutting neighborhoods being Italian, Chinese, Puerto Rican, and African-American. You don’t have to walk more than two blocks to get a pierogi, a knish, or colcannon. I can picture how it looked when Steve was a kid: boys playing skully with bottle caps on the street, and girls chalking hopscotch boards on the sidewalk. I wouldn’t romanticize it as a melting pot, but it was surely a place where diverse cultures rubbed shoulders and managed to get along. The kind of place where the promise of what America was supposed to be was never taken for granted. The true hometown of Captain America.

  Val can read people like a book, which is one of the reasons she was recruited to be an agent. She can tell I want to let something out, but I’m not ready just yet. I don’t even know for sure what exactly happened, and how it’s possible Doctor Faustus hijacked my mind. Does that mean I’ve been a tool of the Red Skull all this time? The guilt and frustration I feel are overwhelming, but I have to deal with it. I have to find out how this happened to me, and I have to make it right. I owe that to Steve.

  I’m mumbling inanities, and she has the European grace to change the subject by asking how my meeting with Director Tony Stark went. Dum Dum Dugan had told her it hadn’t gone well.

  I’m so emotionally drained and exhausted that I tell her the whole story without edits.

  It wasn’t a “meeting” in the strictest sense. It had come to me on the S.H.I.E.L.D. grapevine that Stark had Steve’s body secretly removed from the hospital morgue, and it was now lying in the Helicarrier cryo-lab like some sort of damned specimen. I went storming over there to find the new director waiting to intercept me at the bulkhead hatch to the lab. Stark was wearing the black-and-white S.H.I.E.L.D. combat togs, which ticked me off even more. Slim chance he was ever going into a fight wearing anything but his Iron Man suit.

  He was standing in front of the pressure hatch, blocking the way. I wasn’t about to let him sweet-talk my outrage away. My indignation was righteous and full-blown. I said things I shouldn’t have ever said. Stark was all explanations and rationality delivered with that maddening sympathetic superiority that comes from being too smart and too rich.

  “We had no choice other than bringing his body here,” he said. “Steve was the only successful product of the Super-Soldier program. The information in his cells is protected by several national-security acts.”

  That just ramped up my anger.

  “Steve wasn’t a ‘product.’ He was your friend, Tony.”

  For a moment, it looked like Tony Stark had a conscience. I wasn’t feeling like being nice and understanding. I was hoping his guilt was stabbing him through the heart. Like mine was.

  “Something happened,” he said. “I didn’t want to shock you.”

  He put his eye to the retinal scanner, and the hatch slid open.

  Tony dismissed a half-dozen guards, and we entered an autopsy suite. The form under the sheet looked so small and shriveled, I was struck by the thought that death lays us all so low in many ways. But no—it was too small. I started to say this must be a mistake, that it couldn’t possibly be Steve. But then Tony pulled down the top of the sheet, and I saw it really was him. Steve Rogers as he would have been had he never taken the Super-Soldier Serum: a scrawny old man with a sunken chest and white, thinning hair.

  “Somehow, the Super-Soldier Serum reversed itself when he died. Obviously, this is not something we want released to the general public.”

  I held Tony Stark responsible. Didn’t Iron Man spearhead the call for enforcement of the Registration Act? It was that gleaming red-and-yellow suit on all the posters, wasn’t it? Wasn’t Stark the main reason Steve Rogers had been taken into custody? And now, Stark is director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Steve is stretched out cold on a slab. I told him all that, and he said he’d been trying to do the right thing, that it was killing him to see Steve that way.

  I lost it at that point.

  I slapped him across his face as hard as I could and told him he didn’t get to say that.

  Val stops walking and turns to me.

  “You did not!”

  “I did.”

  “But why would you feel guilty?”

  Did I say that out loud? I must have. Sometimes when you tell the truth, too much of the truth comes out. I pretended not to hear and went on.

  “Then I resigned.”

  “Sharon! What will Nick say when he finds out?”

  “He wouldn’t be Nick Fury if he didn’t already know. Wherever the hell he’s hiding out this week. He’s more elusive than the Scarlet Pimpernel.”

  “But to resign—life without S.H.I.E.L.D.? Whatever will you do?”

  I open the door to the bar.

  “Without Steve, what’s the point?”

  THE bar is twice the size of a regular neighborhood watering hole. and all the ceiling fa
ns, wood paneling, and fake stained glass make me suspect the owners were betting on a gentrification that never happened. It being shunned by tourists and trendsetters was the main attraction that turned it into a place for costumed heroes and their ilk to unwind in civvies and anonymity. The joint is packed tonight, but the usual noisy camaraderie is muted. There’s no music playing on the sound system, and the big flat-screen over the bar is turned down low on a news channel. Val is surrounded by friends as soon as we enter, but people are avoiding me. Either they’re uncomfortable with the personal nature of my pain and loss, or they sense my unwillingness to engage. These are quirky individuals with keen perceptive powers, but they’re generally lacking in social skills. Add to that the tension arising from the fact that some of the people in the room were actively hunting others in the room not too long ago, and you get a bad situation waiting to happen. There’s no “celebrating a life” here. There’s just loss, and the awful understanding that someone you had thought would always be there is gone forever. I know there has to be a healing and a letting go, but it seems too early for me. The wounds are too raw.

  I have the same stupid, impersonal conversation three or four times with people I barely know who buy me white wine and tell me to “call sometime.” I feel relieved when I spot Sam Wilson leaning on the bar and looking lost. It’s hard for me to think of him as the Falcon when he’s wearing a designer suit instead of a red-and-white costume. He’s one of the closest things to family that I have. I haven’t spoken to him since the funeral, and I never thanked him for being there with me in the waiting room at Mercy Hospital. I give him a big hug and tell him his speech was beautiful.