Nolan had always maintained that trust and respect were forms of combat effectiveness. An organization whose members believed they were valued fought differently from one held together by fear or obligation alone, and the difference showed in exactly the situations where it mattered most. This had been his working principle, and it had informed the considerable latitude he extended to peripheral personnel and auxiliary forces operating away from the Twin Islands base.
The Gang Dogs he had just ordered killed had tested that principle.
He walked through the broken corridor toward Madam Gao's office, armored footsteps pressing into the carpet, and thought about whether he had given them too much freedom too early. The answer was probably yes. The Gang Dogs who had just been executed had been scheduled, if Madam Gao had lived, to be transferred to Twin Islands to serve as supplementary forces. They would have been integrated into the base's training cycles, brought into direct contact with the Astartes and the Intelligent Control Corps, had their edges worn into something more reliable.
Instead they had been compromised. And the resource loss was real, but what was more instructive was the mechanism. Doom's homeland defense force recruits in Latveria lacked the raw physical baseline of the first generation of Gang Dogs, who had been drawn from hive-city streets where survival had already filtered out the weak. But raw quality and reliable quality were different things. Perhaps future recruitment needed to weight the second more heavily than the first.
He filed it and moved on.
The office was exactly as Silver Sable's team had left it when they secured it. The floor-to-ceiling window on the far wall had been destroyed outward, sheets of bulletproof glass scattered across the carpet in long, irregular fragments that caught the light. Papers from Madam Gao's desk had been lifted by the brief pressure change and settled in drifts across every surface.
Behind the desk, her body remained where it had fallen. Headless. Undisturbed.
The panacea in her emergency vial had never had a chance to function.
David moved through the room in a slow arc, the blue light behind its optical sensors shifting as it catalogued the scene. After a moment it turned.
"My lord. Based on the trajectory indicators and the pattern of glass displacement, a sniper round through the floor-to-ceiling window is the confirmed cause of death."
"What did your team find before we arrived?" Natasha had her arms crossed, her eyes moving across the room in the methodical way of someone who had investigated crime scenes before. She turned toward Silver Sable.
Silver Sable's expression did not change. Her voice was carefully level.
"Beyond confirming it was a sniper assassination, very little. Because there is no viable sniper position within five kilometers of this building." She paused. "We analyzed every surveillance feed we could access within that radius. No matching person or vehicle appears in any of it."
Nolan had already moved to the broken window.
He stood at the edge and looked out. The view was clear: open water, lower buildings, the geometry of Staten Island's commercial district below. He let his eyes move methodically across the visible skyline, checking angles and distances. The buildings that could have provided a firing line were either too low or too far. Seven kilometers at minimum for anything with the right elevation. Maybe eight.
"Natasha." He kept his eyes on the city. "How many people in the world can make a shot at five kilometers?"
A pause while she ordered her thoughts.
"Within two kilometers, with optimal conditions and the right equipment, I can manage it. That requires good luck and good support technology both working at the same time." She considered further. "A few years ago there was a professional contractor who operated out to four kilometers. I broke both his arms and delivered him to a S.H.I.E.L.D. holding facility. Whether he is still alive, I cannot say. And he could not consistently hit a head target at that range. Too much variation at that distance to be reliable for a clean kill."
She hesitated slightly before continuing.
"If we are talking about someone who can make a head shot at five kilometers with genuine reliability, then the only person I know personally who approaches that is Hawkeye. And he does not use a firearm. He uses a purpose-built bow, and even he would not guarantee success at that range under these conditions."
The hesitation before she named him was brief, but it was there. She named him anyway. Nolan noted both the hesitation and the fact that she had not omitted him.
"My lord." David had finished its scan of the room and turned toward Nolan's back. "I have completed screening of all available surveillance data within ten kilometers. No person or vehicle matching an operational profile appears in the records."
Nolan's gaze had drifted to a bird crossing the view outside the broken window. He watched it for a moment.
"Consider a firing platform that is not a building," he said, mostly to himself. "A vehicle capable of sustained hover and active optical concealment. Stealth technology sufficient to avoid camera detection, stability systems good enough to eliminate platform movement as a variable." He paused. "In that case, the marksmanship requirement drops considerably. You do not need an exceptional shot. You need a competent one with good equipment and an invisible platform."
He turned back into the room.
"Did someone from S.H.I.E.L.D. actually do this?"
David and Natasha reached the same conclusion simultaneously, without conferring.
"Natasha." Nolan walked toward her. "Can you reach Hawkeye?"
She read his intent immediately and moved to answer it.
"Lord Primarch: Hawkeye is a senior agent, but he is not a man who follows orders because they come from above. I can guarantee with my life that he would not have..."
"That is not what I am asking." Nolan shook his head. "I am not going to him because I suspect him. I am going to him because I need someone inside S.H.I.E.L.D. with enough access and enough judgment to investigate discreetly. Specifically: Quinjet flight records. Recent operations. Anything involving stealth aircraft deployment in this area. And it needs to stay away from both Rogers and Fury until we understand what we are looking at."
He stopped in front of her.
"Can your friendship carry that?"
Natasha held his gaze for a moment. Then she took a breath, drew herself up slightly, and performed the Eagle Salute in his direction with a precision that carried something beyond formality in it.
"Lord Primarch. I believe I can do it." A brief pause. "Thank you for trusting me with this."
She turned and walked out of the room. The sound of her footsteps receded down the corridor.
Nolan looked at the remaining people in the room. Silver Sable. Several of her remaining security personnel. He gestured once toward the door. Silver Sable assessed the gesture, assessed Nolan, and made the correct decision. She walked out without comment, and her people followed.
The door closed.
Only David and the Lamenters remained.
Nolan walked to the desk. He stood over Madam Gao's body for a moment, looking at it without expression. Then he lowered himself to one knee and reached down into the debris of blood and scattered documents on the floor.
His two metal fingers found what he was looking for after a moment of careful searching: a small, dried fragment. The remains of the heart-locking scarab, desiccated by the time that had passed since her death, flattened against the carpet. He picked it up and held it between his fingertips.
"The gene detection neural network can access memories by consuming blood and tissue," he said, quietly, not quite to David and not quite to himself. "I have only ever read about doing it on living subjects. This is the first time I have attempted it on someone already dead."
He looked at the fragment for one more moment.
Then he swallowed it.
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