redintheledger | OOM: 2011, Moscow, Russian Federation

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OOM: 2011, Moscow, Russian Federation

Tanya's employment at Club Pravda runs for fifteen days.

Her target, Fjodorov, has a pattern for when he is in town. Different girls, different nights, but he turns up most of the nights, and always at the same time. Departures vary, but that is a lack of pattern that is actually useful.

The trick is getting him to stay in town. He comes for several enough nights for plans to be arranged, and then vanishes, talking on his phone. After a brief conference, it is decided that Romanoff should stay in place and observe while she waits Fjodorov out.

(They put in a time-limit, of course.)

There is plenty to observe. Along with the spoiled brats of billionaires are government officials and organised criminals, all mixing together and meeting, flirting, cutting deals. Tanya serves them all with a smile, and Romanoff reports those she sees while her team follow the camera in her headband. It's useful...but not useful enough to justify staying in place for much longer.

Fjodorov shows up on Wednesday night.

He makes plans for Thursday, and Romanoff takes a moment in Tanya's break to breath deeply in relief.

Thursday, she wakes up shaking. There are people on fire still dancing behind her eyes, and even as she's stumbling over to the bathroom, she knows exactly what triggered that nightmare.

Note to Romanova, don't turn up at fucking Milliways until this is over, she tells herself firmly, and deliberately shoves the issue of Rae and glowing and bodies and strange inter-dimensional bars out of her mind.

She has work to do.

Despite the way Romanoff woke up, the start of Thursday's shift is uneventful. By which she means that it has no more the normal irritations for a busy and popular club that only has humans as patrons.

Fjodorov is comfortable at his table, with bodyguards, a bevy of beautiful girls, and a mixture of friends, contacts, and potential business partners drifting to and fro. By 1:37am, there is a lull, and the man seems to just watching the people on the dance floor.

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"Agent Romanoff." Coulson pauses with the coffee (crappy machine stuff; the cantine staff have closed up for the night) halfway to his mouth, and gestures for one of the Level 1s to try to switch the security feeds and get him something he can actually use.

"Please adjust your wig. There's a strand blocking the mini-cam's view of Fjodorov."

Edited 2013-05-06 01:37 (UTC)

"Mmhmm," goes Agent Romanoff, but it's Tanya who speaks next.

"Sveta, I think I've got an eyelash in my eye, could you-"

Her tray successfully handed over, Tanya ducked out the back and in front of the closest mirror. Thumb into the corner of her eye to follow up her excuse, but then she straightens her hair, finger-combs it back into place.

"There. All better?" she murmurs, as if talking to herself.

"Much, thank you."

Behind him, there's a muffled clatter as Agent Caplin's Leaning Tower of Paperwork finally loses its battle with gravity: she's been on field duty for the last six months, not that Admin seem to have noticed. He tuts, but makes a note to tell Natasha later (i.e. off comms) that she's lost her stake in the corresponding office betting pool.

Edited 2013-05-06 23:57 (UTC)

"So let's do this," Romanoff says in Tanya's voice, and walks back out into the club.

She takes back her tray Sveta, and slips back into her rounds. It's not that long before her round brings her to Fjodorov and his girls - and his guards. Not there is anything for the guards to notice, because she'd slipped the drug into Fjodorov's drink before she got to their table.

"-and here's the Dom Perignon 1966," she says in the creamy-tones of customer service as she bends, flashes her cleavage in ways that could be accidental, could be deliberate.

Fjodorov certainly notices, despite the girls next to him.

Tanya smiles back, all country-girl momentarily forgetting her urban-professionalism. "Will you be needing anything else?"

"Well, when you put it like that..." Fjodorov says, and Tanya bites down on her bottom lip. "My card, girl, so contact me," the arms-dealer continues. Tanya reaches out to take it and

bang

and Fjodorov's blood splatters everyone close to him.

That's when the screaming starts, in the silence as the music is killed, but still there is a voice that shouts above it all, "THE WAITRESS, LOOK AT THE WAITRESS."

The noise, albeit faint, does make him jump, but if anyone asks a) he didn't and b) it was a trick of the light. And anyway he's far too busy: hands racing over screens and keyboards, checking their contingencies, adding extra fall-backs to cover fall-backs, eyes still fixed on the ongoing chaos on what remains of their video feed.

"I assume we're compromised?" he says, by which he means don't worry, we've got you.

Her first thought: what did they make me do-

Fortunately, Romanoff's decades of training makes her turn around without conscious thought, and she's already scanning the crowd by the time her mind snaps back to professionalism. There, one of the dancers on her pedestal; dark-haired with white streaks, still pointing at her with a heavy metal bracelet-

The dancer winks, and vanishes into the panicking crowd. Lots of screaming, lots of running away, which'd suit her just fine except that Fjodorov's guards are moving towards her.

Then comes Coulson's voice, still calm and Coulson.

"Yes, we are," she answers, voice starting to twang with her native Volga accent (never a good sign when she's speaking Russian). "Exit strategy?"

She shifts on her feet, and kicks the heavy ottoman at the closest guard, sending it straight at his knees. One down, but then there are the bouncers moving as well.

Hurry up, Coulson.

Edited 2013-05-07 07:00 (UTC)

"All right."

He's still calm, still neutral, because his heart might be racing but that doesn't matter, that's not what she needs right now.

"Avoid the front, Moscow PD dispatch has it lit up." He flicks a glance for the top-level CCTV, an eye for the heat sensors they have on crowd monitor, another double-checking the contingency he knows is waiting ready. "Head to the roof, there's an emergency supply drop up there for you."

"Copy."

Staff exit, then. Romanoff nods slightly to herself, and then moves. The bodyguards weren't expecting that.

Then again, they never do, and she leaves two groaning on the ground before she slams the staff door behind her. She takes a deep breath, and then runs up the stairs.

"Tanya, what-" splutters Marya as Romanoff shoves past her, but Tanya has been left on the dance-floor, so she doesn't get a reply. She reaches the top of the building mostly without incident, except for three of the bouncers block the door onto the roof.

"Now, Tanya," Ilya starts, and she lets her shoulders drop.

"I didn't, I didn't do anything, please," she starts, voice shaky from exertion. Kiril walks forward to reach for her, and Romanoff waits until his hand is nearly around her arm. Three big guys against a short woman; it's nearly a fair fight.

(She'll give Ilya credit for landing that punch once she's got some ice on it.)

The roof is full of people and music, as if no one had heard a thing or - if they had - didn't give a damn.

"Control, where?"

He doesn't ask if she's all right, because what would be the point? He knows she's all right. And he trusts her to look after herself, and to terrify the whole world just as much as, on occasion, she terrifies him.

"Okay," he says, voice still steady, and frowns at the cam. "Two o'clock. Thirty-five meters, it's in the planter at the edge of the roof. See it?"

Romanoff doesn't answer straight away, busy moving another plant in front of the door to slow down any followers. Then she straightens.

"Copy," she repeats, and makes her way through the crowd. At least the dancing lights make the blood-splatters look more like paint.

She crouches down, and pulls out what to anyone else would appear a backpack. "Got it." It fits her back snugly - of course, thank you, SHIELD, and she secures.

Then she jumps.

She really does love SHIELD's backpack gliders.

He can hear the air whistling the way he imagines she can, too. In a way he wishes he were there with her, but then again he wouldn't be remotely as good as she is.

"At the hotel yet?" he asks, when the whistling seems to stop, and gestures at his colleagues to help find her on the CCTV.

"Ten blocks out," Romanoff says, packing the glider back into itself. "Prepare to lose visuals, if you haven't already," she adds, and takes off the wig. Shoving it into a storage compartment in the pack, she quickly unbraids her hair and shakes it loose.

"I'm going to do a little B&E, there are enough shops around here. Should find something so I don't look like Tanya."

Getting arrested in Moscow would jut be unbelievably embarrassing. No real threats of Siberia anymore, but Fury's wrath?

(And if any of the cops had any ties to Fjodorov...)

"Already lost it, but we're regrouping on the CCTV now."

Coulson checks the mapping on the widescreen while he waits for the geo-sat to triangulate. "There's a couple high-end fashion stores two blocks west of you. And a hiking place half a block north-east, if you want the other end of the scale."

He gestures for one of the interns to bring fresh coffee: he can already tell it's going to be a five-espresso kind of night.

"No Munich repeats."

Edited 2013-05-15 23:29 (UTC)

"...two blocks west," she says, a little annoyed at the circumstances. Alyona never was a hiker, and certainly not at this time of night.

"Munich I didn't have someone sabotaging me."

This might be a bit 'why did everything get FUBARed in Munich, then', but she's dealt with that. The dancer in the club is far more pressing.

Yeah, the Munich conversation's been had before - and will probably be had again, too, but at a less pressing moment.

"We're looking for your friend from the club, but we don't exactly have a comprehensive list of female wetworks experts. Any suggestions?"

He's staring intently at the single frame of her they managed to pull from Natasha's camera feed, but it's blurred and a 270-degree angle; he can already hear a distinctly hopeless note in the graphics team's buzz of chatter. "I don't have much to go on."

"My guess would be a newcomer. This was flashy, this is the kind of thing one would do to say that they are here, and they are good, and if the client wants a message sent, they can do it."

Crossing the street in Moscow is always interesting, even at this hour, and she pauses as she does so.

"But she framed me, which is personal. I've...got no intel on that."

He exhales, carefully at just below the volume audible on the comms. He hates losing.

"Okay. We need to get you out of Moscow before the PD can start making life awkward." He glances across at Transport, and sees Kojinsky give a reassuring thumbs-up. "We're setting up an extraction in Gorky Park, I'll have the exact co-ordinates with you in twenty minutes."

Edited 2013-05-23 22:41 (UTC)

"Copy. I need to get back to the hotel and grab my gear. I'll be in contact."

It's the work of a moment to break into the store, disable the security, and grab a coat. It's the work of a few more to break into the safe and grab enough cash to get to the hotel.

A short taxi-ride later, and Alyona charms the night-receptionist into letting her her into her room.

"Back home, Control," Romanoff says, shrugging off the coat and stripping out of Tanya's uniform to pull on her catsuit.

[Back on the Helicarrier, Agent Koskinen suddenly frowns at the CCTV footage from the hotel roof. "Uh, Control?"]

Romanoff pins up her hair, and then starts with, "Control,do you have-"

The windows smash open as four armed and armoured operatives crash through the glass.

Edited 2013-05-23 23:04 (UTC)

"--Natasha?"

The background noise - and what Kos has suddenly found on the CCTV - startles him briefly into first-name terms.

"Agent Romanoff, do you copy?"

Edited 2013-05-30 00:58 (UTC)

"Copy, four operatives-" Romanoff cuts herself off, and over the comm, there is a spate of gunfire.

"Working, darling," she adds, and slams the lamp into the back of one of her attacks' heads.

After that is just heavy breathing, gasps and grunts and things falling, being thrown. Romanoff yelps, and it's followed by the solid thud of a body hitting the ground.

"That's just rude, boys," she mutters, slowly getting her breathing under control. "They're down, Control. And, what the fuck?"

She's too good for yelping not to freak him out at least a little bit, but he covers it well.

"We have no idea." He is making urgent hand gestures, which are mostly not expletives, at the support staff as they scramble to find out what the hell just happened and why the hell they knew nothing about it.

"Though I appreciate I've given you more reassuring information. Back-up from our new friend?"

"A possibility," she comments, crouching down by one of the bodies to start investigating. If the two events weren't connected, she and SHIELD were really fucked on this mission.

"Control, I think they're Eaglestar. And that's not cheap-"

A groan interrupts her, and she smoothly moves over to now-awake mercenary.

"Hi," Romanoff says brightly in English, accent firmly back to blandly American Newscaster. "Who's footing your bill, kid?"

He shook his head, and Romanoff smiles a little. She's in a hurry, and she's in a bad mood, and the kid is too confused to be worth subtlety.

"If you don't tell me, I'll start slicing the tendons in your fingers-"

"Wait! I don't, don't, I don't know her name," he blurts out.

"'Her'", she repeats.

"She said...if you were still alive....and one of us captured...you were supposed to contact her with a sim card each of us is carrying..."

Romanoff arches her eyebrows, but sure enough, in the pocket he points to, there is a sim card protected by a clear case.

"Okay, that checks out," she says, more for Coulson's benefit than the kid's. "A pleasure doing business with you. Move, and I'll break your neck," she adds, tone pleasant enough that he just nods. She slides a light jacket over her catsuit, grabs her back, and walks out the room.

The hell is she sticking around in a compromised position to talk to anyone.

"Moving out, Control."

"Duly noted."

It has occurred to him that they may well have been comprehensively fucked regardless, but he prefers to save statements like that for situations in which they have better intel.

"What do you need?"

Edited 2013-06-03 01:14 (UTC)

"Co-ordinates would be useful," she says after a pause where she ducks into the staff-only stairwell.

"I'll go to the area anyway and wait. And then I might have a chat to our new friend."

"You sure you want to engage without intel?" he asks, although he suspects it might be the only option anyway.

"I'll have co-ordinates with you in-" He glances up, and sees a gesture from Malik on Transport. "--Three."

"She took out our lead, and the idea of spending another six months crisscrossing Eurasia doesn't appeal," Romanoff says dryly.

"Contact me in three."

It doesn't take her that long to reach Gorky Park, nor that long to get inside. Four hours after closing time, and the park is eerie with its silence. Fortunately, Romanoff has spent a lot of time walking through woods and public areas in the dark, and she heads to the bench the co-ordinates lead to.

Then, she slides the sim-card into her notepad, but before she can do anything, the chat screen opens.

The woman on the screen smiles, the expression lighting up her face.

"Ha! I knew it," she says in Russian, her accent bland as a journalist's. "I knew they couldn't kill you."

Romanoff arches her eyebrow.

"Yet, you paid them to try anyway."

"I know." She even sounds regretful. "So crass. My apologies."

The regret vanishes back into cheerfully reasonable.

"But I had to make sure your skills hadn't corroded since you joined the Girl Scouts."

There are a number of things she could say to that - starting with the fact that S.H.I.E.L.D. does not have nearly as nice cookies - but given they are mostly snarky, and entirely unhelpful, she restrains herself.

(God, she needs some sleep.)

"Have we...met before?" she settles on, after a pause. "I can't say I recognize you."

"We're meeting now, aren't we?" In another person, the line would be obviously smooth; here, it's an upbeat observation.

"You can call me...How about 'Sofia'. That's as good a name as any. It's the city where I first saw you," 'Sofia' adds, as if speaking in confidence. "The infamous 'Black Widow'. And I resolved to live my life by your example..."

Her attention snaps sharp. "That was long before you defected to S.H.I.E.L.D."

Her reaction is more nonplussed than anything else.

At least, her visible reaction.

"If you fancy yourself a 'fan' of mine, you have a funny way of showing it. Killing Fjodorov and framing me for his murder isn't going to win you any autographs."

Not the least because it was obnoxiously showy.

"Again, my apologies. My employer wanted him dead. Just business, you know," Sofia says airily.

"I was casing out the club for days – and imagine my surprise and joy when I saw you working there. Following you back to your hotel the other night, I had the best idea. One never wants to worship one's idol...so much as supplant them."

She tilts her head a little, still looking friendly. "Your trail of the misplaced Starktech has gone dead, thanks to me. But I know where it leads next. In the spirit of healthy competition, I'll tell you...As long as you level the playing field.

You come alone, without your chaperones in S.H.I.E.L.D."

She nods, as if it all sounds perfectly reasonable.

Underneath the calm, her mind is rapidly calculating options and weighing up risks.

"And what do you get if you 'win'?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, didn't I mention? If I win, I take over the mantle of 'Black Widow'."

The cheer slides into a tone that can only be described as a mixture of disappointed and sulky.

"I'm more deserving of it now, anyway, since you've gone soft."

"Agent Romanoff? Am I interrupting?"

He sounds... tense, suddenly - at least by his standards, so to anyone else he would still sound almost serene. But not to her, because they know each other and he already knows what's going to happen next.

"Because if I am, I know what you're thinking, and the answer is 'don't'. There are better options and we're going to need you on this, Natasha -"

There is a moment - not a very long one - where it seems as if Romanoff might actually listen to Coulson.

"Let's talk business," she says finally, and takes off the choker with the microphone before sliding the ear-pieces out from her inner-canals.

Then she destroys them.

SCREE-

The feedback makes him wince, but it's not pain that makes his fist hit the desk so hard two more agents' paperwork takes a tumble to the floor.

It's a split-second reaction; by the time the first agent has whirled to stare at him, he's perfectly neutral again.

(But the bland not-quite-smile's a little tight.)

"Cover the desk," he tells Koskinen, who knows better than to point out she's a grade too low for the job. "I need to go talk to Fury."

"Yeah," Fury says, leaning on the doorframe. "You really do."

His timing is excellent, stepping out of the shadows, coat blowing dramatically behind him. Several agents look up in surprise (and startled dismay).

"Come on. Let's take a walk."

(Damn.)

He knows better than to be surprised that Fury's there, but he wouldn't have objected to being allowed ten seconds to figure out how exactly he's going to explain this to the director.

"Yes sir."

They don't go far. Just down the hall, out of earshot to the other agents. They know better than to eavesdrop, but it's better to remove temptation entirely.

"How much should I be worrying, here? Is this a 'pick up an extra pack of TUMS' problem, or a 'call out the National Guard' problem?"

He doesn't know. For all of thirty seconds, while they're walking, he doesn't know.

"No National Guard," he says.

Yet.

"But I might need some time off-campus."

"Done," Fury says easily, waving one hand. "Pick someone to head up the home operation while you're gone and stay in touch."

He gives Coulson the eye. "I hope you're better at it than Romanoff is."

"Yes, sir," he says again, which is an answer he's always loved for how not-an-answer it is.

"I'll take Lin and Isaacs. Sir."

Which is as good a 'please' as any.

Edited 2013-07-04 21:01 (UTC)

"You've got 'em."

Just as dramatically as he entered, Fury sweeps off down the hallway. He pauses just before the corner.

"And Coulson? Bring my agent back. Preferably in mint condition."

Then, he's gone.

"Yes, sir," he says one more time, and this time it's not just an answer - it's a promise.

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OOM: 2011, Moscow, Russian Federation

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