'Til The End - Bucky Barnes Fanfic

5. A Ghost Story

Jessie and Steve made their way to the hospital. They were going to get the flash drive they left, but noticed it was gone, along with all of the gum. Natasha walked up behind them, blowing a bubble, letting it pop. Steve turned around, and after a doctor walked by, pushed Natasha into a room. Jessie followed.

“Where is it?” Steve asked.

“Safe,” Natasha replied.

“Do better.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Why would I tell you?”

“Fury gave it to you. Why?”

“What’s on it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stop lying.”

“I only act like I know everything, Rogers.”

“But you knew Fury hired the pirates, didn’t you?”

“Well it makes sense. The ship was dirty, Fury needed a way in, so do you.”

“I’m not going to ask you again.”

“I know who killed Fury.” Jessie looked to Natasha.

“Who?” she asked.

“Most of the intelligence committee doesn’t believe he exists, the ones who do call him the Winter Soldier. He’s credited with over 2 dozen assassinations in the last 50 years.”

“So he’s a ghost story.”

“Five years ago I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. Somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff, I pulled us out. But the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer so he shot him, straight through me.” She pulled up her shirt revealing a scar on her stomach. “Soviet slug. No Rifling. Bye-bye bikinis.”

“Yeah, I bet you look terrible in them now,” Steve said.

“Going after him is a dead end. I know, I’ve tried. Like you said, he’s a ghost story.” She held the flash drive to Jessie who took it.

“Well let’s find out what the ghost wants,” she said.

The three headed to the mall. They went to the Apple store where they knew no one would find them. They were wearing disguises. Steve wore jeans, a grey sports t-shirt, and a green sweatshirt with black hightop Nikes, a black baseball cap, and black glasses. Natasha was wearing a striped hoodie, green light jacket, black skinny jeans, and purple hightop Nikes. Jessie wore something similar to Natasha, but her hoodie was purple and her jeans were denim. She also sported fake black rimmed glasses and a snap back hat which she wore backwards. They walked into the Apple store and over to a Macbook Air.

“The drive has a level 6 hunting program,” Natasha said. “So as soon as we boot up, S.H.I.E.L.D. will know exactly where we are.”

“How long to we have?” Jessie asked.

“9 minutes, starting from-“ Natasha put the drive in the USB port of the laptop, “-now… Fury was right about that ship. Someone was trying to hide something.” The files on the drive opened up and began loading. “This drive has some sort of AI, it keeps re-writing itself to override commands.”

“Can you override it?”

“The person who designed this is slightly smarter than me. Slightly… I’m going to try running a tracer. This is a program the S.H.I.E.L.D. developed to track hostile malwares. So, if we can’t read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from.” An employee walked over.