Chapter 97: Kingpin Under Attack
The shopping had gone well.
Vanessa had found two things she wanted and one thing she hadn't known she wanted until she saw it, which was the best kind of shopping trip. Fisk drove because he enjoyed driving — one of the retirement pleasures he'd discovered, the simple satisfaction of being in control of a vehicle without anyone needing to be somewhere urgently — and the city moved past them in its evening rhythm, storefronts giving way to residential blocks, the noise softening as they left the commercial district behind.
"We should do this on Thursdays," Vanessa said, which was her way of saying it had been a good afternoon.
Fisk agreed that Thursdays sounded right.
He saw the truck approximately two seconds before it hit them.
No headlights. No brake lights. Just mass and velocity, coming from a side street at the speed of something that had been aimed.
Two seconds was enough.
He threw himself across the console, putting his body between Vanessa and the impact, and converted.
The diamond form took the truck.
The truck lost.
The impact was total and immediate — metal crumpling, glass going everywhere, the car's frame folding under forces it was never designed to handle. The driver's compartment compressed. The engine went somewhere it wasn't supposed to go. Fire started in the wheel well.
Fisk held Vanessa and held together and let the wreckage settle around them.
When the car stopped moving, he checked her. Unconscious. Breathing. A cut on her temple from the window, not deep. He worked his way out through what had been the passenger door, carrying her, and set her down on the pavement thirty feet from the burning car with the careful deliberateness of someone moving something irreplaceable.
He stood up.
From the truck, a figure dropped to the street. Black clothes, black mask, moving with the economical precision of someone who had done this many times. The man surveyed the wreckage with a professional's eye, registered what he saw — fire, twisted metal, no movement — and reached for his phone.
"Target is dead," Fisk heard him say. "Mission complete."
A voice on the other end, furious: "I said capture, not kill—"
The man on the phone didn't seem particularly invested in this distinction. He ended the call and turned to leave.
Fisk stepped out of the smoke.
The diamond form caught the firelight and threw it in every direction at once. He was moving before the man had fully turned, the enhanced strength that came with the fruit's conversion translating into a force that had nothing to do with his considerable natural physiology.
The hit connected.
The Winter Soldier went airborne.
Bucky Barnes was a man who had been through a significant number of impossible situations and had developed, over the course of a century of intermittent consciousness, a fairly robust framework for processing them.
This qualified.
He came down hard, rolled, came up in a defensive stance by pure muscle memory, and looked at the thing walking toward him.
Diamond. Actual diamond. Moving like a man but built like a geological formation, catching the fire and scattering it in directions that made the streetlights irrelevant.
His mission file had said: Wilson Fisk, 52, retired. No enhanced capabilities. Former organized crime figure. Known associates include enhanced individuals. Exercise standard operational caution.
Standard operational caution had not covered this.
He got his feet under him and tried.
The vibranium arm made the difference — he could absorb the first two hits, redirect, find angles. Bucky was very good. He had been made very good over a very long period of time.
It wasn't enough.
The third strike caught him mid-redirect and sent him through a parked car. He came to rest against the curb, assessed the structural situation, and concluded with considerable clarity that he was not winning this fight.
In a monitoring room somewhere across the city, Pierce watched the camera feed with the expression of a man who has been surprised and does not enjoy the experience.
"Why," he said, with the careful control of someone not yet ready to be fully angry, "does Fisk have abilities?"
The intelligence team did not offer useful answers. One of them tried.
Pierce shot him.
The room was very quiet after that.
"The intelligence is from before," Rumlow said, from the doorway. He kept his voice neutral. "His files showed no enhanced capability. Whatever changed, it changed recently."
Pierce stared at the screen. Fisk had the Winter Soldier by the throat now, lifting him one-handed with the casual ease of a man picking up something lightweight.
"Call it off," Pierce said. "Don't expose the organization."
Rumlow's expression communicated something about the gap between what Pierce wanted and what was currently available, but he pulled out his phone and dialed.
The phone rang inside Bucky's jacket.
Fisk looked at it. Then at the man he was holding — throat in one diamond hand, feet not quite touching the ground, eyes with the specific quality of someone who had stopped expecting to survive this and was making peace with that.
He reached into the jacket and took the phone.
Answered it.
"If I told you," the voice said, "that this was a misunderstanding — we'd be willing to offer significant compensation. Let him go."
Fisk looked at the burning car. Looked at Vanessa on the pavement thirty feet away, still unconscious, a line of blood along her temple.
"A misunderstanding," he said.
"A miscommunication," the voice said. "In an operation that was never intended to involve fatalities. There was a targeting error."
The diamond hand tightened, very slightly.
"You'll want to choose your next words carefully," Fisk said. "I'm retired. I've been trying very hard to be reasonable about that. But my wife is bleeding on the pavement, and the man you sent to do this is about to explain to me exactly who gave the order."
A pause on the line.
"That's not something I can—"
"You have about thirty seconds," Fisk said, "before I stop listening to this phone and start asking him directly. He'll tell me. They always tell me."
The Winter Soldier, to his credit, showed no reaction to any of this. His face was the face of a man who had been in worse situations and had simply stopped registering them.
Fisk waited.
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