Steve put the last man from the first squad down and kept moving.
He made it two corridors before the second squad rounded the corner ahead of him — heavier kit this time, two men carrying stun rigs, three with electric net launchers, one with a grabble-hook gun. Non-lethal across the board. Someone had passed Smith's order down the chain fast.
"Captain Rogers." The squad leader had the voice of a man who'd practiced this. "Director Smith's standing order — stand down and surrender. Your life is not at risk."
Steve stopped and assessed the spread in about half a second.
"I've got a job to finish," he said. "HYDRA doesn't get to stay comfortable while I take a break."
"I'm sorry, Captain."
They opened up — hooks, nets, crackling electric mesh, all of it converging. Steve moved through the gaps, deflecting with the shield where he couldn't avoid cleanly, but he was pulling his force. These weren't HYDRA. The non-lethal loadout told him everything. He couldn't put them down the same way he'd put down the first squad.
It cost him. The net caught his left arm, a hook wrapped around his ankle, and he went down to one knee before he could free himself.
Hill's voice cut through the earpiece. "Captain — eight minutes."
Steve ripped the net loose, swept the hook anchor, and stood up. Around him, six agents were down or dazed. He'd taken longer than he should have.
"I did what I could," he said into the comm, breathing harder than he wanted to admit. "These are S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel. I'm not going to put them in the ground just to move faster." He paused. "Jessica. I need backup."
In the broadcast room, Hill turned to look at her.
Jessica Jones shook her head. "I back Smith's call. Steve not being in handcuffs right now is already a courtesy. I'm not running interference for him."
Hill turned back to the screens. "Falcon — status?"
Sam's voice came through clipped and breathless. "Logging on. Haven't made the swap yet. Still working the perimeter."
The Quinjet had been chasing him for ninety seconds at this point.
Sam cut hard left, dropped his altitude, came back up on the far side of the carrier's keel. The Quinjet's pilot was good — the nose swung to reacquire immediately and the pilot punched the launch control.
Micro-missiles. More than ten of them, small and fast, burning straight for him.
Sam folded his wings and dropped into a vertical dive, then snapped sideways along the carrier's armored underbelly, flying close enough to read the hull markings. The missiles had tracking — they followed him around the curve — but their turn radius was worse than his. The last three overshot the angle and detonated against the carrier's underside plating.
Sam heard the secondary explosion — deeper, structural — and came back up along the hull. One of the blasts had opened a maintenance panel near the chip housing. The approach was clear.
He landed.
A fist hit him before his second foot touched the deck.
Sam went airborne again — involuntarily this time — and caught himself with a wing-snap fifteen feet out. He turned to look at what had hit him.
Mike. Coulson's Centipede recruit. He was standing in front of the chip housing with his arms at his sides and the expression of a man who was exactly where he was supposed to be.
"There's an enhanced on my deck," Sam said into the comm. "Chip position is blocked. Give me time."
He came in low, trying to pull Mike away from the housing. Mike didn't move. Instead he raised his left arm — a metal sleeve Sam hadn't noticed — and a miniature missile popped up from a recessed launcher and locked on.
It fired.
Sam threw himself sideways. The missile followed. He arced around the carrier's outer edge, spotted a Quinjet moving to intercept from the port side, and cut across its nose. The missile tracked him — and hit the Quinjet instead.
The fireball bloomed behind him as Sam pulled up and looked for another angle.
The conference room had gone very quiet.
Pierce sat at the table with his hands folded in front of him, watching Marcus walk toward him with the composed expression of someone who has decided how to play a very bad hand. His own phone was in his jacket pocket — the one that could alert every HYDRA agent still inside the Triskelion. He hadn't reached for it.
If this vampire could pull every memory out of his blood, activating HYDRA's sleeper roster wouldn't save him. It would only burn people he'd spent decades cultivating. Better to cut the loss.
He looked around the table. The Council members were sitting very still — the British representative in particular had gone noticeably pale.
"Logically speaking," Pierce said, "Captain Rogers' word alone shouldn't be grounds for investigating a Security Council secretary." He spread his hands. "But I understand the concern. I have no objection to cooperating." He looked at Marcus with the careful attention he'd normally reserve for a hostile intelligence asset. "I'm simply curious about the mechanics. What exactly does blood tell you?"
Marcus looked at him the way a man looks at a slow-moving chess piece.
"Everything," he said. "Your memories don't lie. They can't. Every experience you've had since birth is encoded in your blood. I read it the same way you read a book." The smile that followed didn't reach his eyes. "A very long book."
The British representative leaned forward. "Is there — a range? A time limit on what you can access?"
Marcus turned the smile on him instead. "No limit. Childhood. Infancy. If the memory formed, I can find it."
The British representative sat back. So did the Russian one. The French one had stopped touching his champagne.
Pierce understood the shift in the room — three Security Council members who weren't HYDRA but absolutely had things they couldn't afford anyone to know. The vampire had just made three new enemies without saying a word to them.
It didn't help Pierce's situation.
He looked at Marcus, who was now two steps away, and made his calculation in about a second and a half.
"That won't be necessary."
The room went still.
"I'm HYDRA," Pierce said. "I'm not just a member. I'm the director." He leaned back in his chair with the deliberate calm of a man who has decided honesty is the only card left. "But I want to be precise about what that means in the current context. HYDRA's ideology — world domination, purification through strength — that was seventy years ago. What we are now is closer to..." He paused, choosing the word. "A mutual assistance network. Like-minded people who believe existing institutions have failed."
Smith's expression didn't change. His mouth curved very slightly at one corner.
"Secretary Pierce. You're so frightened of a memory scan that you're willing to burn your own cover to avoid one." He tilted his head. "Which tells me there are things in your memory considerably worse than HYDRA membership. The full roster, for instance."
Pierce laughed — a short, dry sound. He reached into his jacket, placed a leather portfolio on the conference table, and slid it forward.
"Go ahead and look. I wasn't lying about the mutual aid society, for whatever that's worth." He glanced at Smith. "I learned about you. Your capabilities. What you did to the Kree." Something moved behind his eyes — not quite regret, not quite admiration. "My original plan was to position HYDRA behind you. Follow your trajectory. If a man like you is pointing at the stars, I'd rather be in the slipstream than under your boot." He exhaled slowly. "It seems that particular plan is finished."
Smith looked at the portfolio and then at Marcus. "See for yourself. All of it."
Marcus stepped forward, took Pierce's wrist without ceremony, and bit down.
Pierce's jaw tightened. He said nothing.
Below, on the Triskelion's flight apron, a pilot keyed the base-wide frequency.
"All S.H.I.E.L.D. pilots — immediate scramble. Target is the unregistered aerial unit operating in restricted airspace. Weapons free."
The first Quinjet's engines were already spooling when a howitzer shell hit it.
The explosion took out the Quinjet and knocked three ground crew off their feet. A second blast followed before anyone had processed the first.
Bucky Barnes walked onto the apron with a squad of four behind him. Each of them was carrying a grenade launcher. They worked methodically — no hurry, no wasted movement. A Quinjet on the far pad took a grenade through the canopy. Another took one into the open engine housing. The fuel ignition was spectacular and brief.
Agents on the perimeter brought their weapons up. Bucky raised his rifle first and fired once. The nearest agent dropped.
A ground crew member came from his left. Bucky caught the rifle barrel with his metal arm — the rounds sparked and skipped off the prosthetic — then hit the man once in the chest, once across the jaw. The man flew backward into a running turbofan. The engine did the rest.
One pilot had made it to his cockpit. The canopy was coming down. Bucky ran the full length of the apron, jumped, and landed on top of the fighter at a full sprint. He drove his fist through the canopy glass, shot the pilot twice, pulled the body out, and dropped into the seat.
He had the Quinjet rolling before the canopy was fully gone.
Three other Winter Soldiers split off behind him, each claiming a surviving aircraft from the row. Within ninety seconds, four Quinjets were lifting off the Triskelion's apron and banking toward the helicarriers.
The conference room floor-to-ceiling windows gave a clear view of the apron below.
Tony Stark watched Bucky drop into the Quinjet cockpit and felt something close in his chest like a hand making a fist.
"He's here." He said it quietly, mostly to himself. Then he looked at Smith. "I'm going. Nobody gets a vote on this one."
Smith held his gaze for a moment. "Your parents' deaths belong to you. No argument from me."
Tony was already at the door.
He pushed through onto the rooftop corridor just as a quinjet settled onto the helipad, rotors still spinning. The sound pulled everyone's attention — Tony stopped, the guards turned, and Nick Fury stepped off the aircraft wearing a black coat and a patch over one eye, looking considerably less dead than his official file suggested.
Tony stared at him.
"I heard you were dead," Tony said. "Always figured evil had better survival instincts."
He didn't wait for a response. His phone was already out, pinging Stark Tower. Somewhere across the river, a Mark-series suit detached from its wall mount and began moving.
Fury watched him go. Then he walked past the guards and into the conference room.
Natasha had already dropped the disguise. Fury's eye swept the room — the Security Council members, Smith, Natasha, Marcus with his teeth in Pierce's wrist, Pierce himself grey-white and slumped in his chair — and his expression didn't change much.
Smith looked at him. "I watched them carry the body out. I'll admit I didn't see that coming."
"Staying dead is a short-term strategy," Fury said. "You need contingencies." He looked at Pierce, who had lost enough blood to make the pallor noticeable, and something complicated moved across his face.
Pierce raised his head. His voice was thin but controlled. "I sent flowers," he said. "Did you get them?"
"You thought I was dead," Fury said.
"I did." Pierce closed his eyes briefly. Then he opened them and looked at Fury with the exhausted attention of a man saying something he'd thought about for a long time. "Do you want to know why I put you in the chair? Why I didn't install one of our own when I stepped back?"
Fury said nothing.
"Because you're the best I've ever seen at it," Pierce said. "And the most ruthless when you need to be. You protect people who'd never thank you for it and you don't need the gratitude to keep going." He shifted slightly in the chair. "My enemies are your enemies, Nick. The chaos — the dirty bombs, the grid attacks, the wars that diplomacy keeps failing to prevent — you know as well as I do it's coming. You just disagree about the solution." His gaze drifted to Smith. "Though I suppose there's a better candidate for the job now."
He coughed. "Pity I won't be around to see what Earth looks like from orbit."
Smith looked across the table at Fury.
"You'll be going through the same process when Marcus is finished. Full memory review."
Fury's answer was immediate. "No."