A Birdie Lost in Time | Bucky Barnes

|3|

"Well?"

"I'm trying to decide if I should trust you," Marlow said calmly.

No cameras... she thought, but that didn't mean there aren't bugs.

"Trust has nothing to do with it. You are being interrogated, right now peacefully. If you want to keep it peaceful, you'll start talking."

She knew she couldn't tell the truth. Knowing the shit they were up to, there was a good chance they would believe interdimensional time-travel, and the last thing her timeline needed was Hydra jumping into it.

"Hail Hydra," she said simply.

His posture didn't shift, but there was a spark of realization in his eyes. Like he was trying to determine whether he could believe her to actually be Hydra. Whether it was safe to pull down his own façade.

"What base are you stationed at?"

Safe question. Safe enough that if someone were listening, it would merely be a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent trying to crack one of their biggest rivals.

Her mind worked quickly, pulling up a location far enough away that he likely never interacted with, but large enough that he would know of it. "Nevada."

"What is their function?"

He's not dropping.

"Intel and outsourcing."

"How did you breach their security to learn that?"

"I didn't. I'm telling the truth."

"That information isn't hard to come by; any half-able grunt could have figured it out. Tell me, how did you figure it out?"

"I work there, is how."

"You wouldn't have come by that suit in Nevada."

She'd forgotten she was no longer only wearing the pencil skirt and blouse. No, she was covered by a black suit, bedecked with white armor plates and a black A emblazoned on the breast.

"And if you had, anyone befitting a suit like that wouldn't have been caught."

"Unless I was fed the wrong information," she evaded. "My orders were to come here and extract one of those vials. I was told Doctor Pym would be out, and that the base would be expecting me. Low and behold, I get here and I'm faced with the barrel end of a gun, Joseph."

His head cocked to the side as he watched her, irritation evident on his face. "What little you know of me means nothing. Am I supposed to believe you because you know my name? Because you have basic information on a base?"

"I know quite a bit. I know that after the war, 1500 Nazi scientists were hired into federal positions under the US government in exchange for being pardoned. Thanks to Arnim Zola, Hydra grew within S.H.I.E.L.D., and that's why you're here, at Camp Lehigh—the birthplace of S.H.I.E.L.D. and an undercover Hydra. Since then, we've grown, we've assassinated people; Kolchak, Kennedy, Rostov, Hauser. I know about Operation Iliad, I know about Project Elemental, we orchestrated the Cuban Missile Crisis, I know about the battles of Henry. Are those things a random grunt would know? That a random enemy grunt could find?"

He continued watching her, resolve evidently chipping away but not without annoyance—likely for being kept out of the loop about such an infiltration. Silently, he stood, hands going behind his back before turning, pulling in a slow breath.

She used the moment to tap on her gauntlet, hastily inputting the coordinates home before he turned again, eyes once again boring into her.

"I can't deny you know quite a bit, although much of it seems... related. Tell me, what happened during the Korean War."