November, 1991
New York in the morning had a specific quality that Boston didn't — a density of intention, like the city had decided before dawn what it was going to be that day and was already fully committed to it by the time you got outside. The streets had traffic at seven AM that Boston reserved for its rush hour peaks. The food carts were already doing real business. Everyone walked like they were running slightly late for something that had started ten minutes ago, and they'd decided not to apologize about it.
Ethan walked through Midtown with his hands in his jacket pockets and let the city introduce itself.
He liked it immediately. Not in the soft, gradual way he'd come to like Boston — Boston had been a city that revealed itself incrementally, that rewarded patience and familiarity. New York didn't do revelation. It did exposure, immediate and total, the whole thing presented at once and left for you to sort out. There was an honesty to that approach that he appreciated.
He had coffee from a cart on a corner that was doing something correctly with the roast, ate a bagel that represented a regional cuisine he'd been told about and was only now encountering in its native context, and walked south toward the financial district with the loose purposefulness of someone who had the first item on today's agenda clearly in mind.
Howard Stark.
The question of Howard Stark's current whereabouts in New York was the most important piece of geography he needed to establish, and he'd been thinking about how to establish it since the cab ride from Queens yesterday. The challenge was specificity — he knew Stark Industries was a New York-headquartered company with facilities in multiple locations, he knew Howard had a residence on Long Island from the MCU's brief glimpses of it, and he knew from the Boston news segment that Howard was currently engaged in something for the government. What he didn't know was the specific address of where Howard Stark ate breakfast on a given morning, which was the level of detail that actually mattered.
He thought about his Boston method and decided it was probably still the right tool.
The financial district had the quality of neighborhoods where money concentrated — the specific combination of expensive real estate and purposeful human traffic, and the particular social confidence of people operating in an environment calibrated to their preferences. He was looking for the older residents of the area, the people who'd been here long enough to have the city's pulse in their bones. Not the young professionals with their focused downtown energy. The people who had opinions about Howard Stark, the way you had opinions about a neighbor, from proximity and duration rather than news coverage.
He found his first conversation outside a coffee shop on a street near the financial district, where a man of retirement age was engaged in the specific New York activity of standing outside and watching the block while holding a coffee and having strong feelings about everything he observed.
Ethan approached with the established method. New in town. Trying to understand the city. He mentioned Stark Industries with the casual curiosity of someone who'd read about it.
The man's response was immediate and comprehensive. Howard Stark was, according to this source, a complicated figure in the New York business community — brilliant and credited with half a dozen things that had changed the defense landscape, also arrogant and difficult, and the kind of person who inspired strong opinions in the people who'd had to work around him. He was currently, the man said with the knowing emphasis of someone who felt their local knowledge was being properly appreciated, working on something out of a facility in Midtown — a government contract, very hush-hush, the kind of hush-hush that everyone knew about because hush-hush things in New York had a specific social signature.
"Defense research," the man said. "Same thing he's been doing since the war. They say he's trying to crack something his old partner finished but never replicated."
Ethan nodded with the appropriate curious-newcomer energy. "His old partner?"
"Erskine." The man said it with the weight of someone citing a historical fact. "The German scientist. During the war." A pause. "The super soldier business."
There it was. The serum. Howard Stark was working on what Abraham Erskine had left unfinished, which was consistent with multiple versions of the story he'd absorbed. In the MCU version, it had never been successfully replicated. Howard had spent years trying and not quite getting there, the formula remaining just beyond reach in a way that had clearly cost him something personally.
He had what he needed. Midtown facility, government contract, broadly known but officially undisclosed. He could find the specific building from the air without any further social engineering — one afternoon's reconnaissance at altitude with the x-ray vision, and he'd have the complete picture.
He thanked the man with genuine warmth, bought him a second coffee over his mild protest, and moved on.
Two more conversations over the following hour filled in the edges. An older woman who worked in a building two blocks from a Stark Industries research annex — she didn't know the specific nature of the work, but the security presence had increased noticeably in the past two months, which was consistent with something active and sensitive. A retired building contractor who had done renovation work on a Stark facility five years ago and had opinions about the security infrastructure that were both outdated and directionally useful.
By ten in the morning, he had a working picture.
Midtown location, confirmed. Howard's Long Island residence was mentioned by two of his three sources with the offhand familiarity of something that was known without being advertised. He had enough to begin the aerial reconnaissance, which he would do in three weeks — around December 7th, give or take — when it was time to actually start tailing Howard in preparation for the intervention.
Until then, the criminal network work, and a visit to Westchester, he was increasingly certain about.
---
That evening
The three targets from the Boston intelligence were spread across Manhattan and the Bronx, which in his previous walking life would have been a logistical constraint and in his current aerial life was simply a routing question. He mapped the sequence that made geographic sense and waited for the city to reach the hour that belonged to the work.
He found the first location in the Bronx — a mid-level figure in the Benedetto network's distribution operation, one of the names that had come up twice in separate Boston interrogations with enough consistency to move him to the top of the New York list. The building was a converted warehouse near the waterfront with the specific combination of legitimate-looking commercial activity on the ground floor and considerably less legitimate activity above it.
Six guards. He mapped them through the walls on the approach, the x-ray vision giving him the floor plan and the human geography of it with the clarity he'd been refining since Boston. He went in from the roof — flight made entry vectors considerably more flexible than they'd been when he was limited to ground-level approaches — and worked downward.
The neutralization sequence was faster than it had ever been in Boston. He was moving better, the control more precise, the calibration between enough and too much so practiced now that it was nearly automatic. The guards went down quietly, one after another, lowered to the floor with the same careful attention. Four minutes for six people, which he noted with the dispassionate interest of someone monitoring a metric that kept improving.
The target was in a back office on the third floor, conducting business with the comfortable confidence of a man whose security arrangements he felt good about. His confidence did not survive the next two minutes. The interrogation was efficient — the Benedetto connection confirmed, the operational details gathered, the information stored for future use. The conclusion was as clean and quick as all the others.
He found forty-two thousand dollars in a safe that the x-ray vision had located in the wall behind a framed photograph that was doing its best to look like a framed photograph rather than a safe cover.
He added it to the backpack and went back to the roof.
The second location was in Hell's Kitchen, which was living up to its name in terms of neighborhoods that hadn't yet undergone the transformation that was coming later in the decade. A social club that was operating as a social club in the way that certain social clubs did — the official function as cover, the real function as organizational infrastructure for people whose organizations preferred not to have official addresses.
This one was more complicated, not in the physical sense but in the intelligence sense — the figure here was further up the Benedetto network than the Bronx location, and the information he provided was correspondingly richer. Ethan took his time with it. Names, connections, and the structure of the eastern waterfront operation as seen from this level of the organization. He was building the picture with each conversation, the portrait of Benedetto's operation becoming more complete and therefore more useful.
He also found, in this location, something he hadn't found in Boston: documents. Physical paperwork, the kind of organizational record-keeping that people who had grown up before digital communication defaulted to, in a filing cabinet that the x-ray vision had identified as the most interesting piece of furniture in the room. He couldn't take the files — too bulky, too risky to carry — but he spent twelve minutes reading them by the light of a small lamp, the enhanced vision giving him the ability to read quickly and store accurately.
Port records. Manifest documents that didn't match the public versions. Names of officials in three different agencies whose signatures appeared on things they probably weren't aware their signatures had been applied to. The kind of documentation that, in the right hands, could do significant structural damage to an organization.
He memorized everything he could and left the files where they were.
The third location was in Lower Manhattan, the last item of the night, a financial figure whose role in the Benedetto network was the laundering side — the mechanism by which money moved from the informal economy into the formal one and came out looking like it belonged there. Ethan had less personal animus toward this category of criminal than toward the trafficking-connected ones, but the conversation confirmed enough connections to the human movement operation that the moral arithmetic resolved itself.
He was back at the hotel by two AM, the backpack richer by a total of sixty-something thousand dollars from the three locations combined. He set it on the luggage stand, and lay on the remarkable bed and thought briefly about the figure that had been following him.
He'd noticed it on the walk back from the third location — the particular quality of attention in a public space that indicated directed surveillance rather than coincidence. A man, he'd determined from a casual x-ray glance, without weapons visible but with the posture and movement patterns of someone with professional training. Following with the practiced distance of someone experienced at it.
SHIELD was the obvious conclusion. Or the precursor organization — this was 1991, and SHIELD's organizational history was something he hadn't tracked precisely enough to know the exact name and structure of the relevant entity at this specific moment. But some version of organized intelligence surveillance.
They'd seen him somewhere. Maybe entering or exiting one of the locations, maybe through some other collection mechanism he wasn't aware of. Maybe someone from one of the Boston operations had made a report that traveled through networks he hadn't accounted for.
He thought about whether to be concerned about this.
He was essentially invulnerable and could fly at a hundred and seventy miles per hour. He decided mildly interested was the appropriate level of concern and went to sleep.
---
November 18, 1991
The library he found in Midtown had the card catalogue system that the era mandated — the beautiful, tactile, endlessly cross-referenced physical archive of a world that had organized its information in wood and paper rather than silicon. He found it, if anything, more satisfying than online search, which had the advantage of speed and the disadvantage of removing the serendipity of finding the thing next to the thing you were looking for.
He was looking for Westchester County estate properties. Specifically, older ones, established before the war, the kind of architectural and social history that got documented in the regional publications and architectural records that libraries tended to collect.
Xavier. Charles Xavier. The name he was looking for was attached to a property rather than a person, because a person's private residence wasn't necessarily in any public record, but a property of sufficient age and significance tended to acquire a paper trail.
He worked through the Westchester County property records on microfilm with the patience he'd developed over the past weeks for this kind of research. Cross-referenced with architectural surveys from a historical preservation committee that had done a survey of significant properties in the county in the 1970s. Found a handful of candidates.
The one on Graymalkin Lane materialized from the research with the quiet certainty of the correct answer — the property records showing a Xavier family estate of significant size, the architectural survey describing a large Victorian-era mansion with substantial grounds, the county records indicating ongoing ownership through the current period. 1407 Graymalkin Lane.
He found a map of Westchester County in the reference section and located the street.
He committed the geography to memory, returned the materials with the care of someone who'd been raised to treat library resources properly, and apparently retained the habit across transmigrations, and walked back out into the November afternoon.
---
The flight to Westchester took twelve minutes.
He went to an altitude until he was clear of the city's dense airspace, then dropped lower as the urban landscape gave way to the suburban geography of the county — the larger lots, the older trees, the specific quality of established wealth that expressed itself in space and privacy rather than height. He followed the county geography he'd memorized from the map, triangulating from landmarks, and found Graymalkin Lane as a quiet residential road bordered by mature trees that had given up their leaves to November and stood in their winter architecture against the grey sky.
The mansion appeared through the treeline.
It was large. Not the grotesque scale of something built purely to display resources, but the substantial, confident scale of a building that had been designed to last by people who assumed it would. Victorian in its bones but with additions and modifications that represented different periods of the family's occupation of it. The grounds were extensive — rolling lawn going to winter brown, formal garden areas in their dormant season, the whole estate conveying the impression of a place that was tended rather than merely owned.
He descended to the road and landed fifty meters from the front gate, the November air crisp and still around him.
He walked the fifty meters slowly, taking in the details.
The gate was wrought iron, substantial, attached to stone pillars that had been there for a very long time. A call box on the right pillar, recently installed by the look of it — modern enough to be incongruous with the stone. A camera above it, angled to cover the approach.
Through the gate, the gravel drive curved toward the mansion's front entrance. He could see a light in one of the ground-floor windows — warm, amber, the light of a room that was occupied. A car was parked near the building's east wing. Two cars, actually. Other evidence of habitation that the x-ray vision could have resolved if he'd been inclined to use it, which he wasn't quite yet.
He stood at the gate.
On the other side of it, possibly in the lit room, possibly somewhere else in the building, was Charles Xavier. Probably. The property was right. The timing was plausible — in most versions of the story, Xavier had established the school by the early nineties, and in other versions already in the seventies. Whether it was a school yet or still a private residence, he didn't know. Whether there were students, or just Xavier, or Xavier and a small number of early mutants who would eventually become the X-Men, he didn't know.
He knew that Charles Xavier was one of the most powerful telepaths in the world and that walking through that gate meant almost certainly being known, his mind read to whatever depth Xavier found appropriate or necessary, his entire situation assessed by someone who had several decades of experience assessing people in extraordinary circumstances.
He also knew — or believed, with the confidence of accumulated knowledge from multiple sources — that Charles Xavier was a fundamentally good man. That the project Xavier had devoted his life to was a project worth devoting a life to. That if there was anyone in this world whose assessment of Ethan Coles could be trusted to be both honest and fair, it was probably the man in the lit room on the other side of this gate.
His hand was six inches from the call box button.
He looked at the camera.
He thought about what he would say if someone answered. How did you introduce yourself to Charles Xavier? Whether there was a version of hello, I'm a transmigrated soul from a parallel universe who has infinitely increasing powers and knows the rough shape of the next thirty years of history that landed well on a first call.
Probably not that version.
He stood at the gate in the November afternoon and felt the specific uncertainty of a threshold moment — not fear, not reluctance, just the genuine open question of whether to step through a door that, once stepped through, didn't step back through in quite the same way.
His hand hovered near the button.