Chapter 43: Stark Industries Runs Deep — You Can't Handle It
The sun was coming down at full strength. Tony didn't seem to feel any of it.
Looking at him sitting there in that particular shade of miserable, Matthew briefly considered pulling Leon over and letting the two of them compare notes on who had the bleaker outlook on life.
Not that the current Leon would have made a credible competitor. Right now Leon was doing well. Good salary, work he actually wanted to do, no sign whatsoever of the man he would eventually become. The most depressed person in the world was a title he had not yet begun campaigning for.
Matthew returned his attention to Tony.
"Tony. What you actually need to do right now is fairly simple."
Tony looked over.
"Whoever ran weapons to the Middle East without your knowledge couldn't have been a low-level employee. The logistics alone rule that out. Which means your list of suspects is short. Board level. That's where you start."
"Investigate them quietly, one by one. The answer will surface.What do you think?"
Something landed.
Tony said the word under his breath. "The board."
Then he was somewhere else behind his eyes for a moment, and when he came back, the quality there had shifted. The tiredness was still there. Something had replaced the helplessness underneath it.
He stood. The posture that came with it was different from the one he'd been sitting in.
He had a direction. So he would move in it. Sitting around was not how he did things.
He glanced at his watch.
11:20.
"Hey. Matthew. You helped me out just now. Let me take you to lunch. What do you say?"
"What are you proposing?"
"Authentic American cheeseburger. Cold Coke."
"In that case I'll cook."
Tony stared at him. "You cook?"
"It's one of several hobbies. There's a particular satisfaction in eating something you made yourself." Matthew considered it for a moment. "The Nursery has a full kitchen. We can use that."
"And you're confident I won't need a hospital afterward?"
Matthew looked Tony up and down once.
"The way you've been living, they'd probably admit you before you touched the food."
Tony opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
Meanwhile.
A fried chicken shop on a Middle Eastern street. Midday heat pressing down on everything.
A group of men in black suits and dark glasses pushed through the door. The one at the front scanned the room without expression and walked toward the owner behind the counter.
The owner had been about to greet them the way he greeted everyone else. He changed his mind and moved his hand under the counter toward the firearm he kept there instead. Not an overreaction. This was the Middle East and the shop sat close enough to the border that keeping a weapon within reach was less paranoia and more basic property management.
The lead man reached into his jacket pocket.
The owner's grip tightened.
The man produced a hundred-dollar bill and laid it on the counter. Under it was a photograph. Two people: Tony Stark at the time of his return, and Matthew in a suit.
"Have you seen these two?"
The owner looked at the photo. "...I might have a vague memory."
Another hundred dollars appeared.
"Now?"
The owner's hand came away from the gun. The tension evaporated. He picked up both bills with the enthusiasm of someone whose memory had just made a full recovery.
"Oh, I remember them clearly. They came in and ordered American beef cheeseburgers. Fried chicken as well."
"Did they leave anything behind. In the area."
"Hmm. There might have been something."
The lead man said nothing. A third hundred-dollar bill hit the counter.
The owner's eyes lit up. "Yes. Absolutely. Very clear memory. Before they came to my shop, they left a pile of scrap metal on the empty lot over there."
"What kind of scrap."
"Armor. The old suit kind." The owner was talking freely now, no reason to hold anything back. "After they left I loaded it up and sold it to the salvage yard at the end of the road. Five dollars for the whole pile."
"If you're interested, you could go take a look."
The lead man gave him a look that communicated exactly what he thought of the five-dollar figure and walked out without another word.
The group made their way to the salvage yard. After some searching, they found it in a corner of the lot where scrap was piled without much organization. Tony Stark's Mark I, lying on its side among the refuse, crude and heavy and apparently worth five American dollars to the local economy.
The lead man looked at it for a moment. Then he took out his phone.
"Boss. I think we found what you're looking for."
A pause on the other end.
"Bring it back."
"Yes, sir."
In a private villa elsewhere.
Stane ground out his cigar against the ashtray with more force than necessary and sat with the satisfaction of someone who had just watched a long game pay out.
"Naive Tony." He spoke to the room, unhurried. "Did you really think destroying that site meant I wouldn't know what you and your friend built there?"
"Or did you think there was only one Ten Rings in the world."
He stood from the sofa and turned toward the window. Stark Tower rose against the sky outside it, solid and unmistakable.
"Your work and your inventions. I've seen every bit of it. You're still the most valuable asset this company has."
His eyes stayed on the building.
Tony. Stark Industries runs far deeper than you understand. You were never going to be the one to handle it.
So leave that to me.
"Achoo. Achoo. Achoo."
Tony, in the middle of lunch, sneezed three times in a row.
He looked over his shoulder with mild suspicion, then turned to Matthew across the table. "Were you just thinking I was eating too much?"
Matthew looked up from his bowl. "Would I bother keeping that thought to myself?"
He set down his fork and reached for a napkin.
Tony made a face and went back to the food.
He kept at it until his stomach was visibly pushing against his belt. Then he put both hands on the table and stood.
"That was the best meal I've had in a long time." He said it without any of his usual distance behind it. "I genuinely did not expect Matthew Lawrence to be able to cook like that."
After the meal, the two of them walked along the tree-lined path that ran through the Nursery grounds.
Tony's mood had shifted noticeably from the morning. He was looking at the facility properly for the first time, taking it in rather than moving through it.
What he saw was impressive. Every aspect of the place was configured at a level that government-funded facilities rarely reached and private ones rarely bothered with unless they were making a statement. The thought crossed his mind, briefly and then less briefly, that this was somewhere he could see himself in old age.
It added something to how he thought about Matthew.
He was already carrying the weight of what his company had done. The weapons. The people killed by things built to protect people. And here was a man who had looked at the same world and decided to spend serious money on a building full of children who had nowhere else to go.
That wasn't nothing.
It was, if anything, considerably more than what Tony could say about certain members of his own board.
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