Who: Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff What: Checking out one of the places Janet's dad might be held. When: After this. Where: A fish processing plant near Amsterdam Warnings: Superheroic violence. Stinky fish.
Great. So Janet's dad was under wraps at a fish processing plant, maybe. And if whoever had him didn't get what they wanted, he was likely to end up feeding the fishes, as best as Natasha could tell from her quick study of the Dutch fishing industry and its supporting processing companies and their collective involvement in aquaculture. At least she was working with Tony on this one; between his ability to filter the internet and alter data structures at will, he'd built their cover under instructions from Natasha. (He was dangerous, Natasha told herself. This was a set of abilities she didn't want to be on the other side of.)
Now they were going in as a fisheries inspection team. Natasha had prepared their disguises and they had a briefcase with part of Tony's armor. He'd shaved the mustache and beard that made him so recognizable to everyone only after a long argument; he'd talked himself into doing it by reassuring himself that he could grow it back. She was in severe business clothes with her hair pulled back and thick glasses, and he was in the least Tony-like outfit that Natasha could pull from his clothes, and they were going through the command room for the facility (with the computers that Tony needed to read to find out if Janet's father was actually here) and of course that was when everything went to hell.
Natasha took down the staff in the command center, locked Tony in, and now she was chasing through the facility, or being chased, or some combination thereof. She'd had plenty of guns aimed at her through her various careers but the combination of fish guts, heavy machinery, and high-caliber automatic weapons was a new and particularly nasty trick. Not to mention what they might do to Tony if they broke into the locked room he was working from. The rest of the armor might be close by, but Tony Stark was a lot less invincible than Iron Man without it on his person.
Not that Natasha was invincible, either. She was backed up against a roaring machine that stank of fish, waiting for Tony to give her a clear direction, hoping that she'd managed to drop the closest of the gunmen on her tail. "Left or right? Left or right?"
For the fiftieth time that night, Tony scratched at his disturbingly cleanshaven face and grimaced. It had been more than an argument: it had been downright whining, complete with the suggestion that he could just show up to the plant as himself and simply explain that he was just going to buy it. They could start up Stark Fisheries. He’d had worse ideas.
For some reason, though, Natasha wouldn’t go for it.
Which now left him looking like a third-rate lawyer with hipster nerd glasses and an outfit that screamed whatever the Dutch equivalent of Filene’s Basement was.
“Uhhhh…” he muttered, pushing across the small office in his chair and shoving the arm of an unconscious guard off the table to access the keyboard. Everything he did was an nth slower than usual as he had to rely heavily on Extremis to translate the complete ridiculousness that was the Dutch language. On the panel of overhead screens, he could see her glancing both ways down the hall as she straightened over the latest body to fall at her feet. “Rechts. Right. Right, right. Three more coming round the corner--” He winced as he watched the Black Widow address the issue. He thought he may have heard bone snapping sounds, though it might have just been his vivid imagination being paired with the visuals on screen.
Well, with the cartilage smashing and joint dislocations happily underway, Tony pulled up a series of plant blueprints. They didn’t even have wireless here for him to plug into, else this could all have been done a hell of a lot faster and from anywhere in the plant (though upon hindsight, maybe he’s getting the better end of the bargain -- he certainly won’t have to worry about trying to get the fish smell out of his clothes, even if he planned on burning his for the affront they were to style anyway.) The prints were in scanned in paper. Room for a makeshift laboratory would need good ventilation and a cool environment. Best bets were cold storage or, and he was really going to hate to have to tell Natasha this, waste disposal. “Storage and shipping are located towards the back of the building near the docking bays. If they’re putting Van Dyne to work, it’s large enough and wired enough to be useful. There’s a door that opens to general processing at the end of the hall.”
"On it." Natasha tossed down the crowbar she'd used to disable the last of the agents who'd gotten in her way and headed to the back and the door to general processing. On the other side, in the chill and damp and even stinkier air, Tony directed her through a round of doubling back to avoid another patrol looking for her. "How many thugs did they have in this plant?" she muttered over the comm as she slipped behind a de-boning machine labeled CARNITECH. It was sort of a rhetorical question, but Tony could probably answer it. She should have kept the crowbar.
Well, there were boning knives. A girl worked with what she had. Odds of fatalities were a little higher, but Natasha had no intention of ending up pickled with the herring. One of her assailants was left bleeding on the floor and the other fled. She tossed the knife after him, despite its terrible balance, and was satisfied by the thunk of blade into flesh. "It's freezing in here, Tony. What's happening dockside?"
There was a dark splash of blood spilling out across the screen when Tony happened to glance up at the monitors again. “I am never ordering fish in this country again.”
He pivoted to the tower of camera monitors and flipped through the various CC views accessible to him, trying to get a good read on what lay before them. “No police yet. I predict that will change in exactly…” he calculated the distance from the nearest patrols and stations, “...eight minutes now that the actual fish workers witnessed your little fillet display. We have another problem. I’m completely dark in cold storage. You’re going to have to go in blind.” No security cameras also made blindingly (so to speak, heh) obvious that that was where the most action would be.
Welp, time to do a little work on the side, namely pulling up the plant’s financials and wrapping it up nice and neat to gift to the politie. Money laundering, for a start. How did a large facility whose output was only 35% of that of its competitors stay so mysteriously solvent? Drugs, probably. He had just pulled up the first statement (scanned in PDFs, ugh, did these people still live in the 90s?), when there was a sudden banging on the command center’s door.
“Command, openstellen! Nu!”
Uh oh.
Eight minutes. Not impossible, but it did narrow Natasha's options somewhat. "Hey, he tried to kill me first," she told Tony as she ignored the fleeing fish processors--how had they not already abandoned ship?--pushing through them until she thought better of it and grabbed one by the arm, dragging him with her back toward the door. "Wat is de combinatie voor het slot in de scheepvaart?"
"Ik weet het niet! Ik weet het niet!" Natasha's unlucky target, who had six inches and probably fifty pounds on her, sounded terrified.
"De combinatie!" Natasha hissed and it was more demand than question. There was a burst of gunfire over the comm, none of which involved screams of agony from whoever Natasha had grabbed, just screams of terror, then another meaty-sounding thunk. "De combinatie!" she said again, fierce, and then a new voice was rattling off some numbers.
"Tony, I'm about to go in, what have you got?"
What Tony had was impending trouble as the barrage of shouting became louder and more insistent. The door to the room began to shudder with the repeated kicks and shoves in an effort to force it open. Depending on the quality of the material, it could hold for another ten minutes or it could--
--the door burst open to reveal five very large men with guns.
Well, that answered that question. The man in front -- the one in charge, it would appear (he’d have called him Head Cheese in his mind if the term didn’t have such disgusting gastronomic connotations here) -- began shouting again, pointing his gun at Tony, a stream of strange bouncing lilts he didn’t quite catch.
Tony nodded along, pushed up the glasses that had fallen down the bridge of his nose, and blinked. “Uh...gesundheit?”
He dove behind a bank of monitors as a trail of bullets followed his path. His briefcase had been set down against the the opposite the long side of the bank he was now hiding behind. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He began yanking on his tie, loosening the knot and pulling the whole noose from around his neck, just as goon nummer één started to approach. He waited until the other man’s feet came into view and then sprung up, encircling the noose of his tie around the man’s neck and yanking down as hard as he could on the ends (god, he felt like he was trying to ring the Notre Dame bell, the guy was built like a shit brickhouse). The man made a gagging sound, and Tony slammed the man’s face into the monitors, letting him slump to the floor while he claimed his revolver and swung it around to shoot another goon point blank in the chest before diving back down to the floor once more.
The sound of gunfire and grunts and Tony's smartass answer to sneezes told Natasha she was on her own. She had a split-second choice to make: Tony or the possibility of Janet's father. The answer was that, in the suit or out of it, Tony was an Avenger and Van Dyne was a civilian. Right. She opened the lock and shoved the door open, stepping aside behind the door to avoid presenting a silhouette target, waiting for--
--there was the initial burst of gunfire. Then one of the inside guards stuck his head out: mistake. Nat wrapped an arm around his throat, twisted, retrieved his gun as he fell, and shot the second one as he came out. A frigid breeze was blowing through the door. Natasha stepped through it.
Tony dove for his briefcase, enclosing his fingers around the handle and swinging the whole kit'n'kaboodle at the other man's legs, knocking him clear off his feet and then smashing the case across his skull to put him down for the count. Three down.
He pivoted on his knee and flung the briefcase as hard as he could at Number Four. No easy feat, given how heavy the thing already was, but it was enough to cause the other man to stumble back against the desks. But before he could grab his fallen briefcase again, Tony found himself entrapped by a meaty arm around his neck and nearly bodily lifted off the floor by Number Five, startling the gun from his fingers in the process.
Over the comm, Tony could hear the sounds of interrogation and gunfire. Natasha's patience had clearly worn out. Given his current situation, it was hard to process more than the occasional nee nee from whoever was on the business end of Natasha's reign of terror. Then there was some crashing that sounded like heavy shelves being tumped over and their contents landing wherever they would. "Tony, he's not back here. They've got nothing and they're not lying. We have five and a half minutes. Do you need me?"
Somehow, the glasses had stayed on his face, though they had fallen rather askew in his efforts to free himself from Number Five's crushing headlock. No amount of clawing at that arm would work and didn't have any leverage with his feet, and his vision was beginning to darken around the edges.
Tony gasped, trying to suck in more oxygen, and, in one last desperate attempt, fisted his glasses and jammed the sharp metal corner down into the soft part of Number Five's arm. The other man cried out and his arm reflexively loosened, allowing Tony to free himself (or, really, slump) to the floor.
Sucking in precious air, he scrambled forward, flicked open the latches on his case and closed his hand around one gauntlet, whipping around to backhand a recovered Number Four right in the face. The gauntlet closed over his wrist, then unfolded itself out over his hand. Tony pivoted again, threw out his hand, palm outward as the repulsor lit up and shot a beam of energy right at Number Five even as he fired his gun. The kickback from the repulsor was what saved him -- jerking his body so that the bullet only cut across his left arm in a searing path of pain, but at least not lodging itself into his recently made-whole heart.
Still, flesh wounds hurt like a bitch and Tony bit back a yelp, bringing up his gauntleted hand to curl around his bicep. The still-hot repulsor sizzled against his flesh, cauterizing the wound. It would have to do for now.
He exhaled and stared at the tiny room around him, littered in a sea of bodies.
Adrenaline still pumping furiously in his veins, he said into his comm unit, "I think I’m good, you?” he said, still light and breathy. The news that Janet’s father wasn’t here, though, wasn’t great -- he could only hope that Thor and Sif would have better luck. “We should probably clear out.”
"I can get out from here. What about you?" Natasha's own sea of bodies--human and piscine, and only the latter were all dead--lay scattered about her in the freezing room. There were goosebumps on her arms; Natasha would feel them soon enough, when the adrenaline high from all the violence kicked out. For now the danger of cold was only intellectual.
Natasha could steal a uniform from one of the injured workers and get out through the shipping and receiving docks before the police arrived from her current location. But she'd been hearing grunts and dull thuds and gunfire on her end of the comm as well. Tony had part of the suit with him, but he'd have to retrieve the rest. How fast he could do that, and how easily, was a question Natasha didn't have the answer to.
The moment of decision was on them. She kicked over a container of fish; its contents--fish and the heavy white packets underneath--spilled out. One more rancid stinking thing about this whole operation. "Set a meet, or do you need an escort? Injuries?"
“I’m fine,” he said automatically, wading through the bodies to return to his miraculously still intact computer. “Just gotta giftwrap this package for our friends on the force.” He was determined to not have had this been a complete loss. “Meet you back at Oosterpark in 30.”
"I'm quoting you to Pepper on that," Natasha fired back, but she was already stripping down in preparation for switching identities. "Oosterpark in 30. Widow out."
Tony paused in his typing and glared at the screen, even though Natasha wouldn’t see it. “I hate that you two are friends.”